by Gonzalo Barr
Which leads me to my next point: love takes work. Ignore it, and it will die. My mother likes to say, “Out of sight, out of mind.” She clears her life of a lot of what she calls “distractions” that way. She tells me that part of maturing is being able to focus on what is important and letting go of what is not. “There are only so many hours in the day.” For that, she says, you have to love yourself.
Some people think you have to love yourself before you can love anyone else, that love of self is a prerequisite, like taking Algebra 1 before they let you take Algebra 2. But love of self can be tricky. You are never just one person. There’s the one you see in the mirror. There’s another that my friends see at school. And another that my parents see at home. There’s the self who is working on Mrs. Eden’s extra-credit essay on love. There’s the other self who is sitting on my bed, thinking about this. And so on. If we take this notion—self-love—to it’s logical conclusion, as Rolly would say, then I can never truly love myself, not only because I have so many selves, but also because each self is constantly changing.
Let’s take an easy one—love of the self you see in the mirror. It’s timely too because summer break is around the corner. Summer means the beach. The beach means bathing suits. It means, in a word, exposure.
I am fascinated with tangas. Every time I see a model wearing one in a magazine, I keep coming back to the page. I realize that I could never wear one, even to lie by our pool at home. My father would shut himself in his study. My mother would come outside. “Let me explain something,” she would say, closing the sliding glass doors behind her.
For these reasons, wearing a tanga to me represents emancipation because someday I’ll be able to wear one regardless of my parents’ opinion on the matter. It represents liberation, too, because someday, perhaps, I’ll have the nerve to wear one, even if I don’t have the body for it. It represents independence, the absence of any need to rely on what others think of me.
On South Beach, I’ve seen fat and painfully pale middle-aged women wear tangas. They proclaim their confidence by traveling halfway around the globe to bare themselves in one of the world’s great capitals of vanity. Here I am, they seem to say, with no concern if anyone notices. Here I am, they say, because I don’t need you to tell me what I look like.
I am what I am, they declare with every step, even as the fat in their thighs dimples.
I’d like to be able to do that someday, turn my back on the beach and look out to the horizon, as far as I can see, without caring what anyone thinks of my body or about me. Here I am, I’ll say to myself. Here and now, I am.
14. AFTER WORKING ON HER ESSAY FOR MRS. EDEN, SILVIA SPENDS THE AFTERNOON WITH HER PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS, AND ON THE WAY BACK HOME SHE SENDS ROLLY AN ILL-CONCEIVED CONCILIATORY TEXT MESSAGE
lets talk? :-)
15. GIRLS MEET GUYS
Sunday night. I definitely do not want to stay in. Gloria’s already made plans with Teri O’Donnell, and, again, she hasn’t invited me, nor does she invite me now that I’m talking to her on the phone and asking, almost insisting, to go along. Ignoring all my manners I say, “Good, where can I meet up with you guys?”
I meet them on Lincoln Road, at a café not far from Meridian Avenue. Gloria and Teri sit very close to each other, like two people whispering secrets.
The waitress lights the candle in the middle of the table. Gloria orders a Cosmopolitan and gets away with it. Teri orders the same. I ask for a Coke.
Teri’s trying to convince us to go with her to some strip mall church she’s joined, one of those Bible-thumping cults that’s all about hell and donations. Gloria pretends to be interested, but I know she’s just being nice.
So I’m listening to Teri go on about John this and Revelations that when I notice a guy at the table next to ours staring at me. He’s sitting with two other guys. They look old, nineteen or twenty, but they’re drinking beer, so maybe they are even older. The guy who’s staring at me is not bad-looking. Sandy blond hair. Can’t tell the color of his eyes. He’s wearing a dark tee shirt with something written in what looks like Japanese, blue jeans, and Adidas sneakers. He’s got his legs stretched out from under the table. The waitress comes by holding a tray of drinks and almost trips over the guy’s feet. She stops, points at his feet, and he draws them in. He looks like he’s apologizing to her. Then he looks at me, shrugs his shoulder, and smiles. I turn away.
Teri’s telling Gloria that she has to save herself. You have to safe yourself, she says, which sounds like Teri, drama queen. Last year she wanted to convert us all to the Carbo/Turbo Diet. You’re supposed to lose ten pounds in ten days. Even after the guy who wrote the book got sued when someone who went on the diet died of a massive heart attack and all his books were pulled off bookstore shelves, Teri insisted that it had worked for her and we absolutely needed it, never mind the implications behind the “needed it” part. She’s stubborn like that. Like the way she’s plucked out her eyebrows and drawn them back on with a pencil. (What’s with that?) Everyone tells her she has a “pronounced” forehead (“pronounced” being the polite word for “huge”—Rudy calls her “Billboard”), so she doesn’t need to highlight it some more by drawing in pencil-thin eyebrows. Do you think she listens to us?
It bothers me a little that Gloria went out with Teri again tonight and didn’t invite me. Especially to South Beach, which Gloria knows is, like, my favorite place in the world. The way Gloria and Teri talk to each other, you’d think they were best friends. Only last month at lunch, Gloria said that Teri walks like a horse and the whole table laughed, so I don’t understand the origins of this newfound friendship.
Teri hangs out mostly with Francesca Gutierrez. All year, they’ve been skipping class at least once a week to smoke in the Moon Temple on the old Wicker estate next to the school. The grounds of the abandoned estate are overgrown, and the fountains are green with algae and smell like rotten eggs. I went there once, with Gloria, exploring. The place isn’t really a temple, but a two-story building that looks like it used to be the gardener’s quarters. The front door’s gone, and most of the windowpanes are broken. Someone years ago named it the Moon Temple. It was around even before my parents went to school there. No one knows why they call it that, though there are jokes about what the “Moon” part really means. It’s the place where Sister Edna and, before her, a coach who retired a long time ago and who’s probably dead by now, assured their place in school history by catching several couples going all the way. Every summer, the school mends the fence that runs from the creek to the highway. The metal sign that reads NO TRESPASSING in faded red letters is replaced with a freshly painted one. Then someone tears a new hole in the fence and it’s a free-for-all until the next couple is caught. Most of the time Sister Edna catches the unlucky couple walking over there or coming back. At least they have their clothes on. Two years ago, she caught a couple in flagrante delicto, which is Latin for “deep doo-doo.” They were in another class so I didn’t know them, but the rumor is that the girl was lying under the guy, oohing and aahing, while he was going at it, and when the girl opened her eyes, she saw Sister Edna’s watery eyes squinting behind thick wire-frame glasses, peering over the guy’s shoulder. Both the girl and the guy were expelled the same day. The rumor went through the whole school, via text messaging. The Moon Temple was off-limits again. The building was boarded up and the chainlink fence repaired.
Most of the time, though, it’s cat and mouse, with the mice getting away with it. You have to be into weird things to take off your clothes in all that filth. Almost everyone has a car so it isn’t like you don’t have a cleaner place to do it. Maybe it’s the rush of doing it under the school’s collective and official noses. Some people get off on that. I kind of expect the nuns to bulldoze the Moon Temple one day, but it’s on private property. My mother says the Moon Temple is what in the law they call an “attractive nuisance,” which sounds cool, like the name of a new band.
But now Teri and Gloria have
this newfound friendship, and they’re talking to each other like I don’t exist.
I take my phone out of my purse and check for messages. None.
The guy at the table, the one with the sandy blond hair, is trying to get my attention. I can feel him looking at me, so I concentrate on the flip-open keyboard of the phone. Maybe Rolly hasn’t looked at his messages. He isn’t very diligent about that, which could explain why he hasn’t texted back or called me.
My phone chirps. For an instant I think it’s Rolly. I close the keyboard and press Send.
“Where are you?” my mother says.
I tell her.
“Who else is there?”
I tell her that too.
“Make sure you get back before eleven. You have school tomorrow.”
“I know,” I say, before I press End. I look at my watch—9:25 P.M.
I flip open the keyboard again. What if Mr. Núñez is wrong? What if the law of supply and demand does not apply to love? Look at Lizette—any more supply, and she’ll run out of herself. On the other hand, maybe I’ve made myself so rare that I’ve priced myself out of the market. Or maybe love is neither a good nor a service, but its own raison d’être, needing no justification. It simply is.
miss u :-(
I type and scroll down until I’ve got Rolly’s number.
“Hi,” the sandy blond—haired guy says. He’s standing in front of me. “Do you mind if I sit?” He sounds English or Dutch or maybe Danish.
Gloria and Teri stop talking and look at the guy. I press Send and shut the keyboard.
16. THE OTHER FISH IN THE OCEAN
Fifteen minutes later, Michael, the sandy blond-haired guy, and his friends Alan and Peter are sitting at our table, ordering drinks for everyone. I stick with my soda. They are from the U.K. Two of them were admitted to Cambridge, one to the University of London. They are here for the summer. Alan is very thin, nerdy, with dark hair and glasses. Peter is stocky and reminds me a little of Rolly in the way he dresses. He is the only one wearing an actual shirt instead of a tee shirt. His father, Michael tells us, is rich to an unseemly degree and owns a condo on South Beach, right on the beach, which is when I think that the next thing they’ll be doing is inviting us to see the old man’s watercolor collection.
Gloria likes Alan. She does not take her eyes off him. Teri looks annoyed for having lost the opportunity to proselytize. I’m a little nervous. I’m not naturally outgoing, especially with guys who are older, come from a place that’s thousands of miles away, and have accents that make their banter sound like a comedy routine, so you don’t know when they’re serious.
Earlier this year, when I first started to think about college, I realized that it would be my chance to leave home and still be under my parents’ care. What better deal could anyone ask for? You get the freedom of being on your own, all expenses paid. I asked for brochures from universities in Europe because I thought it would be an elegant thing to be able to say that you studied there, plus they have nice-looking diplomas in ancient languages. (My gynecologist graduated from the University of Bologna.) In the end, though, I knew it would have to be the United States, probably California, if I wanted to go somewhere far from home.
Meeting Michael and his friends reminded me how much change there would be in my life in the coming year. After these two weeks of finals, there’d be the summer, then senior year—standardized tests and college applications. Then I’d be gone. So why bother with Rolly or anyone else? If we got serious, we’d only have to break up the following year. I’ve heard about long-distance relationships, and they don’t work. So why not focus on school? Go out occasionally, but never, ever let it get past the most casual kind of kissing. None of the heavy stuff, like what happened with Rolly.
Then I hear Michael asking me what I’m thinking about.
“Probably her boyfriend,” Teri says.
“Ex-boyfriend,” Gloria says.
“Ex-boyfriend? Poor guy,” Michael says. He turns to me. “I hope you let him down easy. He must be crushed.”
“He dumped her,” Teri says.
I look at Teri, hoping she’ll turn into a pile of salt.
“Then he’s a wanker,” Peter says.
Gloria, Teri, and I look at one another. No one wants to admit that we don’t know what that word means.
“A jerk-off, in your language,” Peter adds.
“Don’t mind Peter,” Michael says. “His dad’s counting on me to polish his manners, teach him the essentials, like which fork’s for the salad and which one’s for the main dish. Like not picking his nose in public. The basics of social intercourse amongst civilized peoples.”
Peter’s about to say something when the waitress reappears with another round of drinks. Teri lights a cigarette and hands it to Gloria, who smokes it like she’s been smoking her whole life. I try to get her attention because I know my face is saying Since when have you been smoking cigarettes? but she keeps her eyes on Alan, who is lighting a brand of cigarettes I’ve never heard of. He offers everyone a cigarette, including me.
“Christ, Alan,” Peter says, fanning the air in front of his face. “I thought you’d outgrown your Jean-Paul Belmondo stage.”
“His what?” Gloria asks.
“The French actor,” Peter says.
“Pay no attention to my provincial friends. They grew up on meat and potatoes,” Alan says after exhaling for what seems like a very long time.
“Not boeuf and pommes de tern, like Alain here,” Peter says.
“They’re just jealous of my cosmopolitan upbringing,” Alan says, looking at me.
I do the polite thing and smile, though I’m calculating whether I’ll be home by 11:00 and my mind is playing a scene in which my mother grounds me until the next sighting of Halley’s comet.
“It smells like you’ve ignited a pile of yak dung,” Peter says.
The topic of conversation changes from the differences between American and European attitudes toward smoking to the differences in musical tastes. I admit I’ve never heard of the band Alan’s talking about, so he offers to lend me the CD.
“Mosh’s last CD’s brilliant!” he says.
“Definitely,” Gloria says, like she knows what she’s talking about, “brilliant!”
Gloria says, “Hey, Alan, what do you think of Miami?” or something like that, which makes him say, “Well, very beautiful, I think,” while he is looking at me, making my ears feel hot, making me pick up the drinks menu from the center of the table, next to the candle, and pretend to read it.
“You’re not going to drink, are you?” Teri says.
“Sister Mary Magdalene here?” Gloria says, pointing at me with her thumb. Teri laughs. Now I’m thinking Rudy’s right, her forehead does look like a billboard.
I know Gloria’s mad at me because of what Alan said. She’s used to being the absolute center of attention with guys. And she’s twice as mad because she likes Alan.
For a second, I wish Alan hadn’t said that or that he’d directed his comment to Gloria, not me. That’s for a second. Then the wish evaporates faster than the foam on the lip of the ocean. And my ears cool off. I imagine Alan and Michael and—why not?—Peter too, ogling me. I imagine an entire neighborhood of guys I’ve never met calling me to ask me out, filling up my voice mail with messages of desperate and unrequited love, palpable and undeniable want, painful and desperate confessions that I am the immovable center of their lives. I imagine that Rolly calls, but when he does the voice mail is full and a recording informs his broken heart that my cell phone is not accepting any more messages, his especially.
Too late, I think. I imagine myself telling him off when he catches up to me between classes, my books held against my chest to keep him from getting too close, to stop all attempts at reconciliation. Too late. You could have had me, Rolly. Instead you went for the lowest common denominator with Lizette. Too, too late.
“Sorry?” Michael says, leaning close to me, so I can hear him
above the noise.
That’s when I feel someone lightly tap the tops of my toes, like a signal from the other end of the universe. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.
Should I draw my feet under my chair? Should I tap back and, if so, what should I tap—the prime numbers, like some kind of Project SETI? 1, 3, 5, 7. 1, 3, 5, 7.
Michael’s turned away, listening to Teri talk about the end of the world. I look around the table for a hint about the identity of the foot tapper. The table’s small enough that anyone, even the shortest among us, can extend a leg and reach the person at the diametrically opposite side. Gloria has her eyes fixed on Alan. She holds the hand with the lit cigarette up against her face, the tip of her pinky tracing the outline of her lips. I’m sure she learned that from an actress in a movie. This is sooooo not like Gloria. Her eyes are squinting from the smoke rising off the end of her cigarette. She says, “Teri, let’s talk about something else.”
“No, it’s quite interesting,” Peter says. “Really.”
“I’d like to know how it’ll all end,” Alan says.
But Teri gets the message. She stops talking and slouches back in her chair, arms across her chest, her forehead shiny with perspiration. Peter’s looking at Gloria when he’s not fanning the smoke coming off Alan’s cigarette. A sweat spot, shaped like a crescent moon, appears on the front of his shirt between his belly and his chest. Alan catches me looking and winks.
