Wicked Jealous: A Love Story

by Palmer, Robin

  Luckily, I was saved by Sol, our waiter. Although everyone who worked there was Asian, they all had old Jewish men names like Sol and Murray and Hymie.

  “I’ll have the shrimp and vegetables,” Hillary said after my dad and brother had ordered. “With a few changes. No vegetables, and only three shrimp.”

  It was hard to tell for certain, but I was pretty sure he mumbled something about how high maintenance rich white women were. He turned to me. “And you?”

  “She’ll have the Kung Pao chicken, the lo mein, some sweet and sour pork, and an extra side of rice. Brown, not white.” She smiled at me. “Brown is much healthier than white.”

  It was like she wanted me to stay fat. I turned to Sol. “I’ll have the chicken and broccoli. No changes.”

  He nodded approvingly.

  After he walked away, my dad went outside to make a phone call. When he came back, they dumped the Italy news on us. Disinviting me from a family vacation. Sending me off to live with my brother and six random guys for the summer.

  “I’d like some time to think about it, if that’s okay,” I said. I turned to my father. “That is okay, right?”

  “Of course it is, honey,” he replied. I rolled my eyes as I watched him glance toward Hillary to make sure that it was, indeed, okay. I couldn’t believe it. My father—a guy who had been in charge of rooms full of Harvard Lampoon–trained writers and stand-up comedians, two of the most difficult personalities known to man—melted into a puddle whenever he was around her. It really was like she had him under some kind of spell.

  “But try and think fast because those extra-deluxe villas go very quickly,” Hillary said.

  I could only hope that my dad’s reverse lobotomy would happen quicker.

  “I can’t believe I have to wait sixty-seven days until you move in,” Nicola moaned at lunch the day after Dad’s Italy announcement as we sat at our table in the way, way, way corner of the cafeteria. During the early fall and spring months, we liked to sit outside, but because it was March we were forced to sit inside. The good news about being considered weird is that you’re not just invisible to your classmates, but also to your teachers, which is why Nicola was able to have her feet up on the table and paint her toenails turquoise without Mr. Machowksy, our gym teacher, commenting on it as he walked by.

  I looked up from my photography book about Paris in the sixties. I loved all the photographs of the French women in their sundresses and pumps and “How could you break my heart into a million pieces when I gave you my soul?” pouts. Nicola kept telling me that with all the weight I had lost and my newfound muscle tone (“That’s what that line on my calf is?!” I exclaimed when she pointed it out to me), it was time for me to ditch my cargos and T-shirts for sundresses, too, but I still wasn’t ready.

  “I didn’t say I was definitely doing it,” I said for like the seventeenth time that day.

  “Oh, you’re doing it,” she replied, for the eighteenth. She began to bounce up and down in her chair. “And I’m going to be over there every single night!” she squealed.

  “Okay, who are you, and what have you done with my best friend?” I demanded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Squealing? Bouncing in your chair?”

  She settled down. “Sorry about that.” She began to bounce again. “But it’s just so exciting!”

  I rolled my eyes. I should have known that, unlike me, who considered living with my brother and his friends some sort of karmic payback for something hideous I must have done in a past life, Nicola would think this was the best news ever. “You know, it would be one thing if you tried to do something about your crush and actually spoke to my brother once in a while,” I said. “Then I could understand why you were so excited.”

  “But that’s the thing,” she replied. “I am ready to do something about it. I’m ready to have him fall madly in love with me and give him the gift of becoming his girlfriend. Plus, I think the experience will really help socialize you,” she said, pulling at the extensions that she had finally convinced her mother to let her get. Which she immediately had braided into cornrows by a woman on the Venice boardwalk and then dyed pink.

  I looked at her. “That makes me sound like I’m a rescue dog or something.”

  “Hmm. It does, doesn’t it? Let me think of another way to put it.” She thought for a second. “Okay, got it. How about . . . if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll run into one of the guys coming out of the shower, and there’ll be a breeze from the ocean and it’ll blow his towel right off.”

  I shook my head. “Not helping.”

  She sighed. “Do you realize most girls would kill to have the opportunity to live with seven guys for a summer?! I bet after this you could get a book deal with all the secrets you learn about guys and the way they think!”

  “Okay, ‘most girls’ sit over there,” I said, pointing across the room at a clique of giggling girls. “We,” I said, pointing at Nicola’s multicolored toes and my French photo book, “are not most girls.”

  “Amen to that. But we’re still girls. And this is still an awesome opportunity to practice being around guys, so that when we finally get away from all these pod people and go to college, we know what we’re doing.” She looked at me. “Wait a minute—are you scared?”

  “No.”

  Her right eyebrow went up.

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Why?”

  “Because! I don’t know how to talk to guys! Let alone live with them!”

  “But you have a brother.” She sighed. “A totally dreamy one.”

  “Yeah, but a brother is not a guy.”

  “This is why this is good! You’ll get one month’s worth of practice!” she cried. “And I’m telling you, you really should start a blog about it, because if you don’t, I will—”

  “But what about the whole farting/burping thing?” I demanded.

  She shrugged. “So? You’ll teach them to stop that. Like some sort of My Fair Dude thing.”

  “No—I meant me. It’s one thing to accidentally fart or burp in front of a boy you used to take baths with when you were little because you have the same DNA,” I explained. “It’s a whole other thing when there’s the risk that some guy not related to you hears you do it. Plus, while the whole veggie thing might be healthy, there are some . . . loud side effects.”

  “Hmm. That’s a good point,” she admitted. She shrugged. “So maybe they’ll teach you. You know, turn you into a lady.”

  I sighed. If I wanted to get anywhere with this, it was probably better if I just had a real heart-to-heart conversation with my brother. We were close. I could tell him how I was feeling, and he’d understand.

  “Okay, not to sound stupid or anything, Simmy, but you keep losing me,” Max said that night as we FaceTimed.

  “Oh. Sorry.” I held my iPad up to my face really close. “IS THIS BETTER?” I yelled.

  I saw him jump back. “No, I can hear you just fine. I meant, I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “What part don’t you understand?” I asked for the fourth time.

  “The part where you keep saying that you think you’ll feel weird around a bunch of strangers,” he said for the fifth. “Because, you know, they’re really not strangers.”

  “Do I know the guys? I didn’t recognize any of their names when you told me about them,” I said, confused.

  “That’s because you technically haven’t met them . . . yet. But that’s the thing—strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet!” he said all glass-three-quarters-full-like. “I saw that on a bumper sticker last week. It’s great, right?”

  I shook my head. Really? He and I came from the same gene pool?

  “Look, they’re all awesome guys,” he said. “I mean, we’re artists—we’re all sensitive and stu
ff. Plus, I really meant it when I said it would be like old times.” He gave me a sweet smile, the one that showed the slight gap between his two front teeth and had the power to make me forgive him no matter what sort of jerky thing he had done to me. Like the time he had erased this totally obscure François Truffaut movie I had DVR’d off IFC before I had a chance to watch it. “You know, back when the biggest problem we had with Dad was whether he was going to drop dead from a heart attack from working so hard rather than whether he was going to marry Hillary.” The smile got sweeter. “I miss you, Simmy.”

  I looked away. “Please don’t call me that.” He knew I had a soft spot for that nickname.

  “But I do! And I know you’ll like these guys. I wouldn’t have suggested it if you wouldn’t. Plus, do you really want to spend a month cooped up in a house with Hillary and have to watch her order people around in broken Italian?” He shook his head. “That woman is evil.”

  I had to say, I was glad that he finally came around and saw that when it came to her, the glass was pretty much empty.

  “Why don’t you talk to Dad,” he went on. “See what he says. Maybe if you get him alone, he’ll tell you that he really wants you to go on the trip.”

  As close as my brother and I were, I didn’t tell him that that’s exactly what I was hoping. Not that I wanted to be trapped in a house where I wasn’t even sure there’d be English programming on the cable channels, but just the idea that my dad wanted me there would make it bearable.

  To most people, having to have your dad’s assistant pencil you into his schedule doesn’t exactly scream “I want you!” but it was either that, or hope to run into him at home at some point. Which had been happening less and less over the last few months. Dad spent more and more time at the studio rewriting scripts after the star of Ruh-Roh, Andrew, married his twenty-years-older-than-him acting coach, who had lots of ideas of how his character should evolve and therefore wouldn’t sign off on the scripts.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said as he rushed into his home office the next night, which, thanks to the feng shui expert Hillary had hired, had been moved out to the garage. The room that had originally been his office was now a walk-in closet for Hillary’s things.

  “That’s okay. Thanks for making the time to see me,” I replied. I felt a little nervous, like I was meeting with the guidance counselor or something.

  He pecked out an e-mail. “Okay. Done. And now for some time with my favorite daughter,” he said. He powered off his iPhone. “I’m even going to turn this off.” He flashed me a smile. “So! How are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You know, not that you didn’t look good before, honey, but the weight loss really suits you.”

  “Yeah?”

  A sad smile came over his face as he nodded. “You’re looking more and more like your mom every day.”

  I felt a golf ball grow in my throat. “Thanks.” I tried not to think too much about how things would have been different if I had a mom. Because when I did, this is what happened.

  “But I will say that Hillary’s a little worried about you. She thinks you’re getting too skinny.” He glanced over at his iPhone but, to his credit, didn’t reach for it.

  Yes, I had definitely lost weight, but there was no way anyone could accuse me of being too skinny. Brad and Nicola had decided that I was more like the women on that TV show Mad Men. (“Not fat, but definitely hauling a caboose,” said Brad.)

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I replied. Whenever Hillary said something—that I was getting too skinny, that I should think about wearing pink lipstick to lighten up my lips—that was the stock answer I gave her. I wasn’t agreeing with her, but it was enough to shut her up. “So Dad, listen. What I wanted to talk to you about—”

  “I have to say, it really warms my heart to see Hillary take such an interest in you kids.” This time as he looked at the iPhone, I saw his hand twitch.

  I waited for the “KIDDING!” that should have followed that phrase, but all I got was the goofy smile that appeared whenever he talked about her. “Yeah, anyway. So what I wanted to ask you—”

  “Don’t you love what she’s done with the house?” he asked. “At first I was worried that she was going a bit overboard, but I’ve really come to appreciate how driven she is. She knows exactly what she wants.”

  She sure did. Like, say, disinviting me from the family vacation, when she wasn’t even part of the family. “I guess that’s one way of putting it. So listen—”

  “And I think that was very sensitive of her to take your feelings into account with the vacation.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, about how you’d probably be bored hanging out with two old people like us.”

  “Dad, Hillary’s not even thirty.”

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “So what you’re saying is that you think it’s a good idea that I don’t come.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I didn’t say that. I just meant . . .”

  I didn’t need to know what he meant. I had my answer. At that moment, my veggie cravings flew out the window. I wanted nothing more than to get in the car and drive to Ralph’s and buy the biggest sheet cake they had. Maybe even an Entenmann’s Louisiana Crunch Cake to go with it. Perhaps even a box of doughnut holes as a chaser.

  If I did that, it might help soften the blow that he was pretty much choosing Hillary over me. At least it would soften it for a little while—as long as it took for the sugar to wear off or for me to feel completely sick to my stomach. But there were two huge problems with that particular solution—(a) my Saab was in the shop again, and (b) I knew it was only a temporary fix. Plus, the last few times I had had a sugary baked good, I had broken out in this weird rash on my chest because my body wasn’t used to it anymore.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, although what I really wanted to do was cry. “Because what I wanted to tell you is that I’m really glad you’re letting me stay with Max while you’re gone. I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “You are?” Did he have to look so relieved?

  I nodded. Because Nicola said I had one of those faces where everything showed, I tried extra hard to look convincing, but seeing as how by that time my father was in the process of turning his iPhone back on, it didn’t matter anyway.

  “I’m glad you came to your senses,” Nicola said the next day at lunch, yelling over Castle Height’s resident treehugger, rally organizer, and all-around protester Wally Twersky’s daily rendition of “We Shall Overcome” on his guitar a few tables away. “And not just because that means I’ll get to see your brother a lot more.” She cringed as Wally got louder. “What’s he trying to overcome this week?”

  “I think I heard him tell Ajara Monihan that it’s the unethical treatment of bunnies for cosmetic testing.”

  “They do cosmetic testing at Castle Heights?! Where? In the chemistry lab?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just, you know, unethical treatment of using them for testing in general.”

  “Oh. Anyways, speaking of unethical treatment . . . now that we have a deadline on our hands, we really need to address your unethical treatment of that totally smoking bod you’ve got growing in that veggie/Zumba petri dish. Because BFFs don’t let BFFs show up at a houseful of college guys with a suitcase full of ratty old cargo pants being held up with safety pins and T-shirts that are way too big.”

  As I looked down at my cargos, I had to admit she had a point. Even using the last hole of the belt I had to wear to keep them up, they were still big.

  She grabbed my arm and turned me toward her and gave me an After-School Special look. “Simone, listen to me—you’re not the fat girl anymore, okay?”

  I began to examine my left cuticle as if it contained all the secrets of the universe. I kne
w where she was going with this. She wasn’t talking about my weight—she was talking about how I still wanted to keep hiding from the world behind the invisible pane of glass that I felt kept me apart from people. Sometimes the glass was Windexed and was so clear I almost forgot it was there—like in gym class the week before, when Ananda Desai told me she liked my Olivia Newton John T-shirt. But sometimes it was dirty and covered with fingerprints and hard to see through, like when Marc Rabel said, “Here comes Cousin Itt,” under his breath as I passed him on my way to the board in trig class. It had been there for so long it was as if it had grown roots.

  “Obviously, I already know how awesome you are,” Nicola went on. “But now it’s time that other people get to see that, too. And more importantly, that you do. And this is the perfect opportunity.”

  I felt like I was in therapy again. And there wasn’t even a bowl of M&M’s around. I knew that there was some truth to what she was saying. Being That Weird Fat Girl meant I could hide out and not have to deal with people. The nickname hurt for a while, and yeah maybe at first I had been lying when I told myself I didn’t care. But the longer it went on, the more I got used to it—I really did stop caring, I think; it was easier to hide. Any whispers or mean comments just stopped touching me. My size became this armor—to protect me from people getting too close. Because they’d always end up disappointing or hurting you if you let them.

  But as the weight started melting away, I didn’t feel happy or relieved or anything. I felt naked. Who was I if I wasn’t That Weird Fat Girl? I didn’t want to be invisible anymore, but the idea of actually being out there, in the world, with no protection, instead of hiding in dark movie theaters or in my room, was terrifying. My baggy clothes were the last bit of protection I had—wearing them I could at least pretend that I still had some armor against whatever was out there.