by Deb Caletti
Sam Jaeger gave me his phone number and kissed me and stuck his hand up my shirt on the last day of the trimester, after we fixed French Toast l’Orange and Southern Hashbrowns and Confetti Fruit Cup for the class. Then he never so much as looked at me again. He wanted me and then he didn’t, and the only thing I could think of was how to get him to want me again. I called that number so many times and listened to his mother’s voice saying hello before I hung up. I wrote him passionate, humiliating notes, as if love required some convincing. I went out of my way to cross his path and bought him bags of M&M’S, because he once said he liked them. And here’s the part I try to forget but can’t—I gave him the pillow I’d made in class. God. That was the most cringing touch—a dog, with pink felt patches for feet.
Maybe I won’t tell the girls this, after all. You want them to know, but you don’t want them to know.
My mother had always said, “Love is work.” I made Sam Jaeger my full-time job without pay. Funny thing was, I never even really liked Sam Jaeger. He always bragged obnoxiously about his dad being a D.J., and he always smart-mouthed the teacher in a way that made you feel bad for her. That’s the thing, see—“love”—it can be more about being wanted than wanting. Needless to say, he never saved me, either.
“Qui-inn,” Aunt Annie called from downstairs. “Phone for you.”
I picked up in the hall, heard the polite click of Annie hanging up. Daniel’s voice had an urgency I’d never heard before. “Quinn, God. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Tonight, right? I’m going to see you tonight?”
I wondered what happened. Maybe he’d had a brush with death. Something extreme to remind him that life was short. Or that life was too long, maybe, when lived without some sort of passion. Maybe he’d fallen and hit his head. Maybe he dropped the hair dryer in the bathtub while he was in it. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m all right. I just miss you, is all. I just really want to see you.”
“Wow,” I said. I felt this little buzz inside, a hum. Something that attached itself to the word “want.” “You’re coming over after dinner?” That’s what usually happened on a Saturday night. He’d come over after dinner; we’d watch a movie. When we first started dating, we tried going out with his friends from track or my friends from volleyball, but it always felt like trying to jam together a couple of jigsaw pieces that didn’t fit. Pieces from entirely different puzzles, even, a snowy mountain cabin scene attempting to merge with an oversized image of Garfield the cat.
“Quinn, do you mind if we don’t? Can we do something different? It’s such a beautiful night…. School’s almost out, summer’s coming…. We can get a blanket, drive over to Greenlake or something….” He laughed a little. The kind of laugh his minister wouldn’t have approved of.
“Okay. Sure,” I said. Definitely a brush with death. Or paint fumes. Or drugs. Whatever it was, I liked it. “Yes. You, me, tonight.”
“‘Yes’ is a great word,” Daniel said.
Sprout laid out the silverware, lining it up on paper towels folded in half, as Gram reached up into the cupboard for dinner plates.
“Why do we put spoons out when no one uses a spoon?” Sprout asked.
“Good question,” Gram said.
“You always made us put out a spoon,” Aunt Annie said to her as she took the milk out of the fridge.
“Hogwash. I don’t give a rat’s ass about spoons,” Gram said.
“Mom,” Mom warned. She opened the oven door, potholders on both hands.
“Oh, they’ve heard ‘ass’ before. Or is it ‘rat’ you don’t like?” Gram said, and Sprout chuckled.
“Wait, go back to the spoon thing,” Aunt Annie said. “Because I’ve always put them out because I thought I’d get in trouble with you guys if I didn’t.”
“Me?” Mom said. “What do I care about spoons?” She took the chicken from the oven. I handed her a plate for it.
“If you’re still worried about getting in trouble with me when you’re almost thirty, you got another problem than spoons,” Gram said.
“Twenty-seven,” Aunt Annie said. “Please. I don’t need you prematurely aging me. And fine, from now on I’m doing whatever I want.”
“It’s about time,” Gram said.
“Forget the spoons,” Sprout said, and put them back in the drawer.
“Unless we’re having soup,” I said.
We sat down to dinner, passed around chicken and Mom’s old wooden salad bowl, and Sprout dropped chicken bits down to Ivar, who sat upright beside her chair, staring without blinking.
“Is Ivar looking fat to anyone else? He looks like he’s gaining weight,” I said. It was one of those moments you wondered if he could hear and understand you, and if you were hurting his feelings. Aunt Annie leaned back in her chair to look.
“Don’t say fat, you’ll hurt his self-esteem,” Sprout said, thinking the same thing as me. “Say he’s got more square footage.”
Ivar was an old dog who until recently only laid around in the sunny spots of the house. Lately, though, he’d leave every weekday morning and we wouldn’t see him again until late afternoon, when he’d plunk down exhausted on his pillow as if he were a Boeing employee returning home after a tough day. We didn’t know where he went or what he did. Maybe he was like one of those guys you read about in People magazine, who have separate families in different locations who don’t know each other exist. Maybe he had his own water bowl and dish somewhere else, and people who wondered what he did all night and all morning and on the weekends.
“Well, he ate half a bag of fortune cookies, remember?” Aunt Annie said. “Fortunes and all. ‘You have an unusually magnetic personality.’”
“That was months ago, though,” I said.
“Did you get your paper done?” Gram asked me. She shook the bottle of salad dressing so that the little bits of herbs swirled up toward the top.
“What paper?” Mom asked.
“‘Phantom of the Opera as Example of Classic Horror Cinema,’” I said.
“Whore cinema?” Sprout said. Mom lowered her eyebrows in Sprout’s direction. “I thought that’s what she said.” Sprout kept grinning as if her joke just kept on pleasing her.
“Phantom of the Opera—oh, I love that play,” Aunt Annie said. “So romantic.”
“Romantic?” Mom set down her fork. “You’re kidding, right? Psycho guy obsesses over woman? Stalks and kidnaps her? Sure, you got candles and fake fog, but my God.”
“You didn’t feel sorry for him? Tormented guy, deformed face, shunned, in love with someone he thought he could never have? Come on, that cry of pain he gives didn’t make you feel anything?” Aunt Annie’s own fork was stuck in midair in disbelief.
“Instability isn’t romantic. Tormented guys aren’t romantic. This is exactly what gets us into trouble. Feeling sorry for them. Help me out here,” Mom said to Gram.
“I never liked a man in a mask,” Gram said.
“Masked—ha,” Mom said. “A metaphor. Hiding his true self. Then, surprise! Surprise, I’m a psycho!”
“He was a psycho,” I said. Come to think of it.
“Let’s talk about spoons,” Sprout said.
“I’m just saying, we mix up pity and love and then, boom. Trouble,” Mom said.
“I would have picked the Phantom,” Aunt Annie said. “Over the other guy. The prissy opera dude…” She looked at me for help.
“Raoul,” I said.
“Over Raoul.” She stuck her chin up at Mom, and you got a sudden glimpse of how Aunt Annie must have looked when she was seven.
“Yeah, great. Good for you. The whole play is like making a romantic musical about some stalking boyfriend who kills his girlfriend in a parking lot. I loved the big dance number in that one called ‘Restraining Order.’”
“You’re too serious,” Aunt Annie said.
“Something only said by people who aren’t serious enough,” Mom said.
“Girls, girls,” Gram said. “I’
ll send you to your rooms.”
“I give up,” Mom said.
But she didn’t give up. After we’d put away the dishes and Gram went back to eBay and Aunt Annie went out on a date with Quentin Ferrill, Mom sat alone at the kitchen table, a piece of blank paper in front of her, a red Sharpie in her hand. She made a list. A list titled “Warning!” Under that, attributes to be on the lookout for in a guy. He has either a very low opinion about himself, or a very high one, she had written. Under that: He believes he’s more special than other people. The rules don’t apply to him.
I stood behind her. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Mom, I love you, but you’re losing it. Do you want to just lock us in our rooms and not allow us to date until a panel of experts approves the guy?”
“Excellent idea,” she said, and chewed the end of her pen.
“We’re not stupid.”
Mom set down her pen. “It’s not a matter of being stupid. You can be smart and not know. And you can know and not care. Sit down, talk to me,” she said.
“I’ve got to go. I’m going to meet Daniel.”
“He’s not coming over?” She raised her eyebrows.
“He wants to go to Greenlake and walk or something.”
“Well, good,” she said. “I was wondering if the two of you ever talked. All those movies…” She took my hands. I could have guessed what was coming. The thing that she always said when she wanted to cover up extreme behavior on her part. “You’ll understand when you have kids of your own,” she said.
“Right.”
“I was twenty years old when I met your Dad. That’s only three years from where you are now. Three years! This could happen to you in no time. From that one point, my life veered off. You and Sprout are here because of it, and I’m grateful for that. But, Quinn, I just wish somebody would have told me. Somebody should have said…”
“They could make it a requirement at school. Relationships 101.”
“I’m not kidding, they should,” Mom said. “The most important decision you’ll make, and no one tells you how.” She let go of my hands. “All right. You’ve got to go, and I’m going to Lizbeth and Jack’s for some dessert-champagne thing. She got promoted at REI. Now there’s a twist of fate for you. REI, Lizbeth, who can’t walk and bounce a ball at the same time, and who thinks a hike to the mailbox should be rewarded with a Ho Ho. You guys should stop by. Sydney’s home for the weekend.”
Lizbeth was Mom’s friend since their days at the UW. They both ended up living in Nine Mile Falls, and Sydney, Lizbeth’s daughter (a student at Whitman), and Evan and Charles, her twins, were like cousins to me. The small white line by my left eye was from the stitches I got falling off the trampoline they had in their yard. “Next time?” I said. “Daniel really wants to go to Greenlake.”
“Okay. I understand. Hey, I love you, daughter.”
“I love you, too.”
“I’ve got to go figure out what to wear,” Mom said.
I followed her upstairs. Ivar tried to shove ahead of us like he always did. To him, the starting gun went off the moment someone’s hand touched the banister. Mom wore her old khaki shorts with all the pockets, a tank top dotted from spots of wayward bleach. Her hair was pulled back, making a too-small pony tail. There was a smudge of red on her forearm, from leaning on the paper a moment ago. I loved her. I did. But in that moment, right then, looking at that smudge, there was something about her that irritated me. Maybe it was her own ordinariness, the ways she came up lacking. The gray showing through her brown hair, her relentless insistence on wanting the best for us, her slightly bristly legs. But being irritated by her made me feel weirdly relieved; the hazy, hovering worry I’d had since seeing the objects lifted. I had a mean thought—it sat there in my head the way a crow does on a railing—cruel, entitled, mocking. That’s why he left.
Daniel was definitely on uppers.
“Let’s lie down,” he said. He spread out a blanket he’d brought from home, a blue quilt with a fabric image of a girl in a bonnet on it.
“She can lie in the middle.” I pointed down at the girl.
“Holly Hobbie,” Daniel said. “My mom’s had this blanket since she was a little.” Which explained the white rickrack at the blanket’s edges. Seventies-kid bedspread. He tested the fabric with his palm, to make sure there was no dampness underneath. He sat down and looked up at me with a grin as shiny as a new appliance.
“Why are you so happy?” I said. I sat beside him. He leaned back on his elbows, looked up into the lacy trees over us.
“God, Quinn. Why not be? Why not be happy when this day is so beautiful?”
I looked over at him, watched him for signs of dilating pupils or sudden tremors. Daniel talked about his math test, or how Evan McConnell was such an ass but how Coach Grayson never noticed. He didn’t talk about feelings or life or anything larger than a moment. We’d laugh about Señora Little, the new Spanish teacher, whom you’d feel sorry for if your capacity for pity hadn’t turned into frustrated contempt. Her lack of classroom control had turned every fifth period into a prison riot, which she attempted to fix with altered seating charts and “new rules” that lasted the day. Adam Seddell and Mitchell Hagen would move her cactus around when her back was turned, and Mitchell Hagen was a good guy who never got in trouble anywhere else. Sean Riley got expelled from the class after hitting the donkey piñata with snowballs, became an office T.A. instead, and now used his new position to excuse students from fifth period. The principal had sat in Mrs. Little’s class five times that semester alone, but still students would ring up the class phone as she taught, or set their own phone alarms to all go off to “La Bamba” at exactly one thirty. Daniel would tell me what happened in Mrs. Little’s third period, and I would tell him what happened in her fifth, but happiness and beauty were not things we discussed.
I leaned down next to Daniel. I ran my fingers along his arm, the soft hairs there, and it seemed that maybe I could think about Daniel in a new way. Something about him had changed and I didn’t know why. I put my nose on his sleeve, remembered his separateness from me, his internal life I knew nothing about. It seemed thrilling to me, the fact that I might not know or couldn’t know. It made me feel like I wanted him, maybe for the first time, although maybe it wasn’t really him I wanted, but just the chance to overcome some obstacle within him, to get him to hand over something he wasn’t willing to hand over. Maybe desire needed mystery. Maybe desire needed something out of reach, some impossibility. Desire meant wanting, not having.
Daniel’s shirt smelled flowery, sweet. It didn’t smell like cotton and laundry soap. It was strong enough that I wrinkled my nose. “Did you get squirted by some perfume lady at Nordstrom’s?” I said.
“What?” Daniel said. He brought his sleeve to his own nose. “I don’t smell anything,” he said.
We watched a slow jogger, a woman who did not lift her feet while she ran, but instead shuffled them close to the ground. Then, her opposite, a man made thin with tight, shiny nylon, speeding past on a bike with wheels circling in a blur. We watched a man and a wife and a baby, lifted from a stroller and placed on a quilt.
Daniel leaned in and kissed me then. It was a different kind of kiss, less distant and polite, more present. It felt like a part of Daniel was there in a way he’d never been before. I tried to be there too. I so much wanted to be there, to feel something you might call love. I tried to summon up that feeling, what I guessed it might be like, something big. It was a little like the time my dad took Sprout and me to a circus. Long ago, before he left, one of the memories that had stayed with me from when he lived with us. I must have been no more than nine. He was excited to go, and I can still remember trying to get there, too, to that excitement. I smiled and went along and clapped and tried hard not to feel what I really did, which was sad, because the elephant’s eyes looked sad and the girls in sequins looked sad, and the trapeze artist rubbing chalk on his hands looked sad, yet still I was clapping and smiling.
/>
I kissed Daniel, but part of me, the truthful part, was holding back. His lips slowly pulled away from mine, and his eyes were closed, but he looked happy. He looked almost surprised when he opened his eyes.
“Quinn,” he said. I’m not sure who he was expecting.
“It’s me, I’m here,” I lied.
ANNIE HOFFMAN:
Hank Peters, freshman year of college—sort of proved that if a man likes himself more than he likes me, I’m in. Yeah, boy, I’m right there, laid out across the emotional freeway, ready for the Truck o’ Love to run me right over. Ha. Um, he was the professor. Can you say “Daddy Issues”? No one in my family knows about this because they would kill me. Something about him made me sure that even his silence held some great weight of importance. He’d keep on with his class lecture when we were in his car making out. I thought this was weirdly sexy. “Alluuusions,” he’d say, with his lips on mine. He’d transition into some talk of fine wines or music I’d be sure to know nothing about. Then he’d check his looks in the rearview mirror before starting up the car again. He was constantly bragging about the writers he knew and the few things he’d published in literary magazines, the kind no one reads except the people in them. Heated love triangle. He, himself, and me.
We both were in love with him. And, of course, in the competition with him for his love, he always won. The big prize goes to…guess who. I always came up short. Are you going to be wearing that to dinner? he’d say. Or, How can we help you make a better decision than that? He couldn’t like me better than he liked himself, he was just incapable. He wasn’t built with the ability to see other people. I was just the warm breath on his own mirror. Which meant this was a competition I would always lose, which meant I would feel like shit in the end, which meant I would get what some fucked-up part of my psyche was after.
