by Diana Welch
“I hit my knee,” I sobbed. “And it hurts.”
Liz frowned. “I think you’re crying because you’re spoiled,” she said gently. “I think you want to go to Carvel, and you’re crying because nobody will take you.”
“Nuh-uh,” I said weakly, rubbing my knee. Now, on top of everything else, I was caught. And I was mad, too, because if she knew I wanted to go to Carvel the whole time, she could have at least said something when I was out there asking over and over. It wasn’t fair that she could just show up in the doorway and make me feel stupid. This was my room, where I went so nobody would see me. But when I looked back up to tell her so, Liz was gone.
AMANDA
I HARDLY SPENT any time at the cottage. I was living in a freshman dorm at NYU in Washington Square Park, but I took the train home most Friday nights. Still, I avoided the cottage as much as possible. I worked weekends at Heller’s Shoe Store in Mount Kisco to pay for stuff, like food and books and going out, and I also had a job mucking stalls for a woman named Abbie. When I wasn’t working at Heller’s or at school, I would stay at Abbie’s until eleven or twelve at night, listening to her talk about her kids or her horses.
On some weeknights, though, I would meet Mom at Sloan Kettering Hospital on the Upper East Side. Earlier that summer, right after she got her job on Loving, Mom found out her cancer was not completely gone. Apparently, they didn’t remove all the infected lymph nodes when they took out her uterus, so she needed radiation treatments to get it once and for all. The cast of Loving was so supportive. The writers actually wrote Mom’s story line several weeks ahead; then everyone would shoot her scenes in a row so Mom could take a week off to do her radiation and recover. It was so cool of them.
Mom would drive the Mercedes in for her appointments, but she never wanted to pay for parking, so I’d take the subway to the hospital to meet her. She’d go in for treatment, and I’d drive to a nearby playground and wait in the car. Which was fine by me—I didn’t want to go into the hospital anyway. I’d do my homework for an hour, and then drive up to the hospital, where she’d always be waiting outside. Then we’d drive home. I did that every time she had radiation. I don’t remember any conversations on those rides home. She was always too tired to talk.
DIANA
MOM’S SCAR WAS puffy, lips sewn shut. Her pale belly waited beneath the quivering water, a silent monster lurking. With my sneakered feet curled beneath me on the bath mat, I put my chin on the edge of our cool yellow tub and looked at her. She was relaxed, eyes closed, head on the tile behind her, mouth open, slack. I poked my finger into the warm water, just barely touching the swollen line that stretched below her belly button and above her dark, sparse pubic hair.
“What’s that?” I gently moved my finger across it. It was purple in parts, and when the water’s surface, frantic from my slight movements, settled down, I could see the little dots where there had been stitches.
“A scar,” she said, not moving, eyes still closed. Her cheeks gently puffed with each breath, like she was sleeping.
“I know,” I said, quickly. I had scars, too. I was born cross-eyed and had scars on my eyeballs, which had been taken out and stuck back in a couple of times. I also had one from an operation I had when I was four, because I woke up one morning and Mom said I looked like a bullfrog. She brought me to the hospital where they cut open my throat and took out a gland. Then they sewed it up again and put a big white bandage around my whole neck. I couldn’t turn my head; the bandage was big enough to rest my chin on. I had to wear it to school until the cut healed, leaving pale pink train tracks jerking across my throat.
Mom’s scar looked like it hurt, more raw than mine. “From what?” I asked, my whole hand still in the warm water. Mom sighed, the dough of her belly rising beneath my finger. She said nothing, and it hurt my feelings.
Usually, Mom was the only one who didn’t ignore me. When she was home, I was the center of attention. She’d pick me up for hugs; I’d sit on her lap while she paid the bills. I liked to give her long kisses on the lips, staring into her eyes and breathing out of my nose. She never pushed me away; even when she was talking to people, she’d just talk out of the corner of her mouth with my lips pressed against hers. At night, she’d tell me I was precious, and we’d snuggle in bed until we both fell asleep. The only time I didn’t love her more than anything in the world was when she made me take my asthma medication in yogurt instead of ice cream. And I loved her the most when it was just the two of us in the Jeep, running errands. Mom would drive through the streets of Mount Kisco, her eyes searching in front of her before they turned to me. “Where are we?” she’d ask, in a worried voice.
“We’re lost!” I’d say, buckled into the passenger seat next to her, barely able to see out the windshield.
She’d just look to me, eyes wide, and bite her lip. “Where should we go?”
“Left!” I’d shout, and she’d follow my directions even though all I could see was the sky ahead, the traffic lights, the telephone lines. With my head pressed against the blue leather of my seat, I’d let her take me anywhere. We were together, safe.
The last stop on our route was always the car wash. As Mom paid, I rolled up my window, sealing us in as the car slid forward. When blackness blocked out the afternoon, I unbuckled my seat belt and Mom pulled off her sunglasses. Eyes wide, she raised both hands as if she were in a holdup, staring at the steering wheel that jerked about on its own, possessed. I squealed in the darkness as a wicked thunderstorm crashed all around us, gushing water onto the glass. After the windshield cleared, we could both see the rag monster dancing in the distance. I stood, leaning my butt against the back of my seat to get a better view of the sudsy tongues about to slobber all over us.
“Here it comes!” I yelled and, preparing for the climb onto Mom’s lap, dug the heels of my sneakers into my seat as usual. But on this day, instead of grabbing me by the waist and pulling me toward her, she grabbed onto the back of my pants.
With her right hand hooked around my rainbow belt, she nudged me toward the windshield with her fist, crying, “Into the belly of the whale!” For a second I was confused, not understanding why she was pushing me away. Then I leaned onto the dashboard and pressed my nose to the glass.
LIZ
I WAS IN love. His name was Paul Martino, and he was a senior, the captain of the lacrosse team, and the hottest guy in all of Fox Lane. He was more than six feet tall and had thick dark hair, piercing blue eyes, and a gap between his two front teeth. He was always joking around, always laughing and flashing that gapped-tooth smile. But Paul didn’t know I existed, even though I walked out of my way to pass his locker every day to get to my social studies class. Paul’s locker was next to Sean O’Hara’s, the older brother of my new best friend, Maureen. Liz Subin had gone to private school that sophomore year, so I started spending as much time as possible at Maureen’s house. Every day, Sean would say, “Hi, Liz,” as I passed, but Paul never seemed to notice.
That December, Maureen and I decided to go to the Snowflake Ball even though we didn’t have boyfriends to take us. I borrowed a dress from my neighbor Betsy, who had a closet full of party dresses and let me choose whichever one I wanted. I picked out a maroon velvet scoop-neck dress with short puffed sleeves and a scalloped edge and wore it with a pair of Mom’s black high heels. Sean gasped when he came to pick me up with Maureen. “It’s Christie Brinkley!” he teased as I climbed in the back of their brown Chevy Citation.
“Very funny,” I said, secretly pleased. That was the look I was going for. My hair, long and wavy, was still warm from Mom’s curlers.
At the dance, Maureen and I sat on the radiators that encircled the Commons sipping Sprite punch, people-watching. When a slow song came on, Jeff, a junior whom Maureen had a huge crush on, walked over and sheepishly asked her to dance. She turned a dark pink, looked at her hands in her lap, and bit her lip before nodding and following him to the dance floor. I watched, riveted, as Jeff tried to figu
re out where to put his hands. Maureen covered her mouth with her hand and laughed as Jeff settled for her waist. Then she put both hands on his shoulders and smiled big, pursing her lips so as not to expose her silver-laced teeth. I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up. It was Paul, towering over me. I figured I was in his way, so I moved to one side. But then he reached for my hand.
“Wanna dance?” he asked.
Before I could respond, he pulled me out onto the dance floor. I’d never slow-danced before, but it didn’t matter. “I’m Paul,” he whispered into my ear, wrapping his arms around me.
“I know” was all I could muster back. He pulled me closer, and I placed my cheek on his shoulder and scanned the room for Maureen. Someone had to see what was happening to me so I knew it was real.
Paul grabbed my right hand and held it close to his heart and said, “I’ve had my eye on you.” Silently, I thanked God he was holding me so tightly. Otherwise, I would have been pulsating and convulsing and sparking, a live wire, right there on the dance floor.
As we rocked back and forth, I caught sight of Maureen. I slowly peeled one arm from Paul’s shoulder, pointed at his back, and mouthed the words “Oh my God!” Her eyes bulged when she saw me, and she flashed a huge silvery smile.
When the evening ended, Paul gave me a kiss on the cheek and asked for my number. He called the following day to invite me to a party. As soon as I saw his car lights beam up the driveway, I ran out the door and jumped into the passenger seat before he had a chance to even turn off the engine. “Doesn’t your mom want to meet me?” he asked in response to my enthusiastic “Let’s go!”
He was wearing his red Fox Lane lacrosse jacket and smiling at me. I wanted to smash my face into his, like some couples I spotted on the dance floor the night before.
“She’s not home,” I lied. “Another time?”
We arrived at the party, and I suddenly knew how it felt to be famous. Paul held my hand as the mob of people milling around the keg in the kitchen made a path for us.
“Mar-ti-no!” one lacrosse player shouted, giving him a high five. Maureen’s brother Sean was at the keg. He poured Paul a beer and winked at me.
I saw Maureen in the corner and practically ran to her side. I grabbed her hand and squeezed all my excitement into it. “Ow!” she said, wrestling her hand from mine but smiling wide. “So how does it feel to be Paul Martino’s girlfriend?”
I had no idea. But after my third plastic cup of lukewarm beer, I began to see.
“Let’s wander,” Paul said. He pulled me past the game of quarters in the dining room to a door leading to the basement. As we descended the stairs, it was pitch black. I held Paul’s hand with both of mine. He stopped suddenly, and my whole body slammed into his. Then he kissed me. We stumbled back toward a couch and spent the rest of the night as just lips and tongues.
From that moment on, I knew what it felt like to be Paul Martino’s girlfriend: It was bliss. When he smiled at me in the hallway, helium replaced blood in my veins. If he snuck a kiss, I was paralyzed. And everyone at school knew we were dating. At Fox Lane, I was Paul’s girlfriend, not the daughter of a sick widow. I worked hard to keep those two identities separate. No one at home knew I was dating Paul. There was no point in telling anyone: Amanda thought Paul was an asshole—to her, all jocks were—and Mom had other things to think about. June, her character on Loving, was about to murder her husband, Garth Slater, who kept her drunk so he could sneak into their daughter Lily’s room at night to molest her. In the script, she kills Garth to protect Lily. While that may have been good for Lily, it was not good for us. June was being sent to an insane asylum, which meant Mom would be out of a job that spring.
I’d been dating Paul for several months when one evening I was in the kitchen searing pork chops and felt two arms wrap around my waist. I jumped. It was Paul. Horrified, I frantically scanned the room. The white walls were scuffed from too many things stuffed into not enough space. Mail was piled up on the kitchen table. Boxes lined the living-room walls. The couch and two armchairs that once furnished our den in the gray house crowded the small living room, where Diana was doing her homework on the floor. She looked up at him, her eyes magnified four times their true size by her pink glasses.
“Hey,” she said, then went back to her homework.
“Hey,” Paul said back, then turned to me.
“What are you doing here?” I gasped, panicky.
“I thought I’d surprise you,” he said, grinning.
He sure had. Here I was in Mom’s apron to protect my clothes from the pork chop splatter, my hair messily twisted into a bun on top of my head. At school, I was a girl with golden curls who got good grades and scored a hot senior boyfriend. That girl had a mom who made sit-down dinners and took her back-to-school shopping. I desperately wanted to be that girl, not the girl whom Paul was, at this moment, holding by the waist, the one whose ill mother still had to work long days in the city to put food on the table, food that she didn’t have time to cook. Not the girl who lied to Diana’s teacher when she dropped off birthday cupcakes and said Mom made them. Not the girl who lied when Maureen called with a sleepover invitation, saying she’d have to check with her mom, then hung up and called back fifteen minutes later, pretending her mother said it was fine. Paul wasn’t dating that girl. He was dating the other one. And the longer he stood in the kitchen, the sooner he would figure it out.
I suggested some fresh air and led Paul to the pool house, which technically belonged to the Chisolms but was closer to the cottage than to their house. We snuck in through the sliding glass door, and as we kissed in the darkness, I tried to pretend that the pool house still belonged to my family, that nothing had really changed. But soon I felt a pang of paranoia: What if the Chisolms walked in? What would they say? I knew Amanda was bringing Mom home from the city. What if they arrived, saw the pork chops in the pan, Diana all by herself, and Paul’s car parked in the driveway? I sat up, startled, and said I had to get back home.
As Paul was getting into his car, Amanda pulled into the driveway with Mom in the passenger seat. Paul jumped back out, and I introduced him as my friend.
My mother smiled wide. “So nice to meet you,” she said.
Once inside the cottage, Amanda exploded. “I cannot believe you’re dating him!” she said. “He’s a total jock! A cocky jock! What’s wrong with you?”
“Now, Amanda,” Mom interrupted, “he seems a perfect gentleman. Leave her alone. Besides, your father was a jock.”
I turned the stove back on and finished frying the pork chops, glad for the task. It meant I could keep my back to my family so they couldn’t see my face, flushed with anger and shame. Mom was being a dork, Amanda was being a bitch, and I was grinding my teeth to stop from screaming at them both to shut up and leave me alone. No one ever mentioned Paul again.
The following Friday night, Paul invited me to dinner at his house. Paul said his family ate fish every Friday night, something to do with being Catholic. We all had to bow our heads before dinner, and then everyone touched his or her forehead, belly, and each shoulder, eyes closed. I had mine squinted so I could mimic them, half a beat behind. After dinner, Paul’s parents went to church, his youngest sister to her room, and the two oldest sisters out with their boyfriends, leaving us alone. Paul led me to the den in the basement of his family’s split-level ranch house.
It started like any make-out session would. But soon Paul quickly slipped his hand beneath my shirt and bra. I knew this was second base. Maureen and I had talked about bases, and she had gotten to second with Jeff. It felt okay when he touched my breasts. Sort of scary when he started to knead them, but still okay. Then his hand worked its way quickly to my pants. He unbuttoned them with one hand while we kissed, as if he had done this many times before. He pulled my pants and underpants down with one hand too, and I thought, okay, this is third base. Maureen and I had talked about this, but she had not done this before. None of my friends had. I was starting to g
et nervous; this was totally new territory, a new frontier. Paul stopped kissing my mouth and began working his way down my neck with his lips, then my breasts and my stomach. I watched, frozen, wondering, “What the hell is he doing?”
DAN
CURTIS TOLD ME that Paul ate Liz out. One afternoon, when Liz and I were sitting on the grass in front of the cottage, I told her what I heard because I wanted to get a reaction out of her. But I didn’t expect the reaction I got.
She got mad, and Liz never got mad. She turned to me and said, “Don’t you ever let anybody talk about me like that again.” Then she just walked away. I felt awful; I had betrayed her. Someone was talking shit about my sister, and I should have stopped him. Then I got mad, too, not at Curtis but at Paul for talking about her like that. From that point on, I wasn’t going to let anyone say anything bad about my sisters. I was only in seventh grade, but I started giving the high school guys mean looks when I saw them on campus. Just thinking about them disrespecting my sisters made my blood boil.
I knew what they were thinking: Mom told me that if I was going to lose my virginity, to do it with someone I didn’t respect. I guess her thinking was that if I didn’t respect the girl, I wouldn’t fall in love with her and so I wouldn’t have my heart broken. I guess she thought it was something Dad might say to me. That was my birds-and-bees talk.
But it wasn’t enough: I had a hard-on the entire time we lived in the cottage. I had no idea what was going on. It was awful. My penis would get hard for no reason, and I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d try rubbing it, but nothing would come out and it wouldn’t go away. I had no one to turn to. Once, Amanda walked in on me watching Caligula. She had rented it and told Mom it was for a Latin credit, but this movie was basically a porno. One afternoon when nobody was home, I decided to watch it. Of course, I got a hard-on, right there on the couch in the main room. I didn’t hear the car pull up, but suddenly Amanda came in through the front door. So I jumped up off the couch and started break-dancing on the living-room floor, hoping she wouldn’t be able to see my erection.
