by Don Zolidis
Let me pause for a second: I had no idea what Cabaret was. I guessed, according to these people, it was about cross-dressing Nazis, which did indeed sound dangerous. It also sounded like something a thirteen-year-old black boy in Wisconsin would have trouble explaining to his parents.
“You know who loves musicals?” said her dad. “The gays.”
I pictured the dining table in flames. Glenn put his head down. Amy started twitching. Her dad shoveled food into his mouth, oblivious.
“I love musicals,” I said.
“You do?”
“Oh sure,” I repeated. “Cabaret is awesome, in fact. It’s um…really super good. Yeah—I listen to it while I play football and, um…lift weights. Pumps me up. In a manly way.”
There was a brief pause. Glenn exhaled.
“But what I really want to talk about,” I said, “is the Green Bay Packers.”
I survived the rest of the dinner. The conversation remained on the Packers’ playoff chances and storied history for at least an hour. Once her dad got on that subject, there was no stopping him. Glenn finished dinner like a Hoover vacuum and escaped to the kitchen.
In the Carlson household, it was the kids’ responsibility to clean the table and wash the dishes. Glenn came back, snatched as many dishes as would fit in his hands, and darted back into the kitchen. Amy got up to follow him and I leaped up to help.
“Oh no, Craig is a guest,” said her mom. “He can stay out here with us while you guys clean up.”
“No, I’ll help,” I said.
“Oh, nonsense!” she chortled. “Sit.”
“I—I’m actually…” I stammered, “training—for restaurant work, so it’s really important for me to get this experience.” I scooped up the gravy boat and escaped to the kitchen.
Glenn was already hard at work filling the sink with suds and staring out the window with a haunted expression.
Amy was still fuming, but managed to pat him on the back. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s cool, don’t worry about it. It’s cool.” Glenn kept filling the water and squeezing dish soap into a sponge. “Hey,” she said. “It’s gonna be all right.” She smiled at him.
I stood there for a second, holding the gravy boat, not sure what the protocol was. “Um…here’s a gravy boat,” I said, handing it over.
“Thanks,” he said, running it under the faucet as Amy went back for the silverware. I stood there for a second and he added, “Thanks for, um…intercepting my dad back there.”
“No problem. I don’t know shit about Cabaret.”
“It’s cool.”
“I’m sure.” I picked up one of the dish towels and started drying things off. I will add that, remarkably, I was not good at this. I had never been good at drying dishes. It was one of my many failings as a human being.
“Are there like a lot of kids into Cabaret in middle school? Is it a whole thing now?”
Glenn smiled and shook his head.
“Really?” I said. “Man, I woulda thought that it was huge. Like whole gangs of kids beating you up if you don’t know the lyrics to the songs.”
He laughed.
“Nope. Just me.”
“Oh. Well…it’s better in high school. There are people into musicals. Not like a ton of them. But there are some. People don’t judge you quite as much. I remember middle school; people thought I was a dork. And now look at me.” I spread my arms, keenly aware that I had paired a tie-dyed shirt with a flannel. “It probably can’t get better than this.”
Which was true, in a way, because it was about to get a whole lot worse. By nine o’clock Amy’s parents were watching television in their bedroom and it was time for the Christmas present debacle. Glenn had retreated to his room after the dishes were done, presumably to listen to show tunes and play Tetris.
I retrieved my unwieldy sack of presents that included the weird charm thing, a VHS tape of Fantasia, and a pair of earrings. She had a tiny little present for me.
She looked at what I’d got.
I looked at what she’d got.
Both of us thought, Shit.
I made sure to hide in my pocket the twelve coupons I’d made for neck massages. Maybe I’d give them to her at our two-month anniversary. (At this point, I was counting total time going out, rather than the amount of time since she had taken me back in Madison.)
“Wow,” she said.
“Yeah, I was…um…” I couldn’t really even speak. There were no words to defend this.
“So I got you this.” She handed me her present.
It wasn’t even wrapped. Because it was a hat. Was it a romantic hat? Not really. I’m not sure there is such a thing as a romantic hat.
“It’s a hat,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You might need it if you go to college in Minnesota.”
Maybe I should’ve gotten her a bikini for UCLA.
That would be even weirder than what you did get her, Craig. You are stupid.
My stomach was beginning to drop into the floor when something stopped me. Her card. She had written, Merry Christmas, Craig! And then, next to that, she had drawn a heart and written the word Amy.
She had drawn a heart!
Sure, it wasn’t the best present in the world, but it was the thought that counted, and the thought behind it was clearly summed up by the drawing of the heart. She wouldn’t have put the heart there if she didn’t truly feel the heart, right? Right?
CRAIG IS ABOUT TO DO SOMETHING RIDICULOUSLY STUPID
Of all the dumbest things I’ve ever done in my life, this probably stands as number two or three, just edging out the time when I was sixteen and said, “Wow, these pickles really look like cucumbers.” And then everyone stared at me like I had three heads, and I slowly realized that pickles were, in fact, cucumbers.
I looked at the card and the admittedly nonromantic hat.
“You heart me, huh?”
“What?”
“You heart me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You drew a heart here.”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, I did.”
“So does that mean…you love me?”
Amy’s eyes went wide like she was watching a meteor about to hit the earth. Her mouth quivered just a bit.
“What?” she said.
There should’ve been something in my brain screaming Abort mission! Abort mission! at this point, but I had shut down all rational thought.
“Does that mean you love me?” I said, repeating the stupidity.
“It’s just a heart,” she managed.
“Which is a symbol of love.”
“It’s a heart.”
“But it means love. It’s like a symbol.”
“Ninety percent of girls put little hearts over their i’s!”
“Yeah but there’s no i in Amy! All right, never mind.”
“We’ve been going back out for three weeks!”
“Well, you’re throwing out mixed messages here!”
“IT’S A CARTOON HEART!”
“IT’S A SYMBOL OF LOVE! And—and—if you add the three weeks this time with the four weeks last time, that makes seven weeks. And that’s enough time.”
“Time for what?”
“To fall in love.”
Amy freaked out a little bit. She put her hands through her hair. One eyelid didn’t blink in unison with the other one. She was still really pretty, though.
“Are you in love with me?” she asked.
Yes, obviously. Yes, madly, 100 percent.
I said, “Uh…”
Amy reached down and snatched the card I had got her, which had a pug in a Christmas wreath on it because I hadn’t been able to find anything better. She flipped it open. There was a heart next to my name.
“There’s a heart here!” she shrieked.
“Yes!”
“You love me! You freaking love me!”
This was not going how I had planned. Not that anything ever went li
ke I planned, but having your girlfriend shake an accusing finger at you and guess that you loved her wasn’t how I imagined this going.
“Seven weeks!” I shouted like a madman.
“You can’t love me yet!”
“Too late!”
“Argh!”
Jump in, Craig. What’s the worst that could happen?
“All right. Fine, I love you! Okay? I love you like crazy.”
And then I just started making dumb-ass metaphors because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. These were the honest-to-God things that came out of my mouth:
I love you like chocolate cake.
I love you like those mother bears love their bear cubs.
I love you like a bald guy loves Rogaine.
I love you like a heroin addict loves like a million pounds of heroin.
Hey, Craig. Those are similes, by the way. Not metaphors.
Shut up, dorky part of my brain.
“Craig,” she said, putting both of her hands on my shoulders like she was trying to restrain a madman. “This is not normal.”
“I know.”
“And…I know you’re new at this, but you’re really kind of freaking me out right now.”
“I’m a little freaked out too,” I admitted. “But I’ve never been in love before.”
“Okay. Okay,” she said, trying to come up with an argument. “I just…It’s just too much, okay? The after-school stuff?”
“We get to spend more time together—”
“Right, but, like, I see you out in the hall when I’m in a meeting or something and, like, you’re pacing.”
“I like to walk.”
“Right, but you’re walking back and forth in front of the door. Like…that’s weird. And the calls and the…it’s kind of suffocating. And tonight at dinner and now…” She looked down at the pile of presents in her hands. “I don’t think this is working.”
What’s not working? Us? We’re not working? But I’m awesome at this!
I stared forward in dumbfounded silence. The room began to tilt.
“How about we take some time off?”
“Time off from what?”
But I knew the answer to that.
Later, I made some poor choices, which included standing on her snow-covered lawn and shouting up at her window like a deranged lunatic.
“I’m not giving up!” This is exactly what stalkers say. “I love you, Amy! And I know that you’re scared of our love right now, but I’m going to keep on burning like the shooting star that I am!” I was still on the simile kick apparently.
Amy’s mom opened the door. “You’re going to catch cold, sweetie.”
“That’s a price I’m willing to pay.”
She wrapped a scarf around herself and walked out into the cold, moving gingerly and wincing against the cold. It was funny, because at that moment she kind of resembled Amy—the way she walked, the way she talked, everything about her reminded me of Amy.
“Oh,” she said with her big Wisconsin O. She took a deep breath; there was something calmer about her now, like the tension at dinner had dissipated.
“She’s making a terrible mistake,” I said. “I mean, she’s obviously really smart and again I want to reiterate that she could get into any college she wanted to, but it’s clear that she’s making really stupid choices here,” I stammered, freezing, vaguely recalling the fact that Amy’s mom had given her a book about stupid choices.
Amy’s mom put her hand on my shoulder. “Oh, honey.”
I stared down at the ground. I could feel the tears welling up behind my eyes. “I thought both of our feelings were the same.”
And then I was crying, again, on Amy’s lawn.
Her mom pulled me closer. “That’s why you talk to each other. You talk about it.” She punched me on the shoulder a little bit, which was weird.
“I’m not gonna say it’s meant to be. I don’t know that anything’s meant to be. But you never know. And she likes you, I know that much. She really likes you. Okay?” She grabbed hold of both of my arms and looked up at me. “She’s gotta figure things out. So give her some space.”
“…Okay.” I sniffled.
She held me another second.
“You want some brownies to take home?”
“…Yes, please.”
When we were inside, the house was cool and dim. Bear had rolled onto his back and was showing his belly to the world, only slightly opening his mouth to reveal his massive set of terrifying, genital-destroying teeth.
Amy’s mom had gotten out some Tupperware and was cutting brownies.
“Oh, well—you know, we had wanted kids for a long time. We had our hearts set on it. Dan—I mean, he pretends to be a goof, but it just crushed him when we found out. That it wasn’t gonna work out. But that’s life, right? Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Sometimes the big things don’t work out.
“So you start thinking, Okay, well, I’ll do what I can, then, and we’ll get to take all those trips we wanted to take. And we’ll get a dog and we’ll make a full life anyway. So we went all over the place—we went to Europe, we went to Thailand, we were both working, but every time I’d see, you know, little kids, I kept thinking…That’s not for me…. We don’t get to have that….
“So then—it was my forty-fourth birthday and Dan came in and he said, ‘How would you like to adopt?’ And I said, ‘Our whole life is gonna change,’ and he said, ‘Sometimes that’s a good thing.’ So we got Amy. She was six days old. And it was like somebody flipped a switch and suddenly the world was in color. And I know I’m tough on her, and I’m tough on Glenn, but I just…I want everything for them. I couldn’t even imagine how happy she would make us, and how happy Glenn would make us. So you never know.”
She finished putting the brownies in the Tupperware.
“You can keep this, okay?”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You gotta bend, you know? With whatever life throws at you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I looked at the floor and she drew me into a hug.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she said. “You’ll get over it.”
But I didn’t.
Brian held up a picture of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. “This is a picture of a human female,” he said. “There are about three billion of these on the planet. Pick another one.”
But I didn’t want one of the three billion. I wanted the one.
Oh God, said the Kaitlyn voice in my head, rolling its eyes.
The aftermath of the second breakup was similar to the first. I face-planted in the snow again (“Are you gonna do this every time?” asked Elizabeth), I moaned, I lay about, I rolled around on my bed and drove my friends nuts. No amount of coral would help.
Youth in Government was over, and I bummed rides from Elizabeth now instead of Amy, so our contact was limited to awkward interactions in the hall. I would see her coming, and I’d break out into a sweat and panic about whether or not I should make eye contact. And then I’d decide, Yes, eye contact, she will see my eyes and she will come to regret this decision and also, I want to show with my eyes that I’m no longer clingy and am actually a functioning human being and shit I missed her, where did she go?
And it continued that way for about two weeks until the night my friends kidnapped me, shoved me into the back of Elizabeth’s car, and dragged me to Perkins.
Perkins was a twenty-four-hour diner by the interstate which functioned as a community center for all the freaks, weirdos, nerds, and lunatics who couldn’t find anywhere else to go. It had a smoking section, which was typically packed to the gills with teenagers, and serviced by one waitress who wanted everyone to spontaneously combust. The fluorescent lights buzzed brightly, but the vaporized cloud of nicotine in the air served to make the place as hazy as a fog-shrouded Scottish moor.
“I hate this place,” said Brian, as soon as we got there.
Elizabeth wrapped her arm around his shoulder and pul
led him toward his doom. “We are here to cheer up Craig. Solidarity.” Elizabeth promptly left us to drop in on a table of skate punks in the corner.
“Perkins is awesome,” said Groash, fishing in the “wishing well,” which was a (you guessed it) well-shaped bucket containing cheap plastic toys for small children and, apparently, Groash. He snatched a blue jumping frog and pocketed it like it was gold.
Perkins had the benefit of having a bottomless cup of coffee, which came in a metallic canister reminiscent of a missile silo. The coffee tasted less like coffee and more like liquefied asphalt. Sheryl, our waitress, dropped it on the table with a thud and went to the back to resume hating us. Probably because we stayed for hours.
“I bet I can stay here longer than you,” Groash said, pointing his plastic frog at Brian.
“I have a curfew,” said Brian.
“I don’t care. I can still stay here longer than you.”
“I don’t want to stay here. This place is a boil on the ass of Janesville.”
“And I can stay on this boil longer than you can.”
Sheryl returned to collect our menus. “Are you going to get anything to eat or are you just going to sit here for hours drinking coffee?”
“This guy is gonna have pie,” said Groash, invading my personal space.
Sheryl was not impressed. “What kind of pie.”
“All the pie.”
“You can’t have all the pie.”
“This man was dumped. His heart was broken.”
“I’ll have the cherry pie,” I said, before Groash could comment on my masturbation habits again.
“Great,” said Sheryl, continuing to hate us.
“You know what?” said Brian. “I will stay here longer than you. I don’t care. I will beat you.”
“It’s on, man.”
An hour after I finished the pie we were on our third silo of coffee. Brian, who was unused to caffeine in large doses, was a twitching, frothy mess. He giggled at nothing at all, and was constantly pushing his fingers through his hair. Groash had steadied into a rhythm, but the coffee was hitting him hard too. My stomach was a boiling, radioactive waste dump. The immense pain in my gut was taking away from the pain in my heart, so the Perkins jaunt was a success.
