I'm Not Your Other Half

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “I don’t want to do it,” said Michael definitively. “I want to be with you.”

  I felt the way Katurah had felt when Michael leaned over her to kiss me. You’re suffocating me, I thought. But that can’t be. This is the way it works. My mother and father. Ben and Lynn. Price and Annie. Matt and Susannah. Even Mr. Hollander and Judith.

  But Mr. Duffy doesn’t think so. Mrs. Ierardi doesn’t think so. So who’s right? How do you do this, anyway? How far do you go? Forget sex. Sex is a pretty simple decision. Either you do it or you don’t. But sharing. How much do you share?

  We tossed our hamburger wrappers into the trash and walked out to Judith’s car. It was very cold, but when Michael opened the door for me, I slipped into a greenhouse of heat from the sun shining through the windshield.

  Don’t think about it, I told myself.

  “Kiss me,” said Michael, and I kissed him, and it was easy to think of nothing but that.

  Annie was sitting in her bedroom window seat, framed between the gray of the sky and the cream of the walls. I was flopped on her bed.

  Thank God for friendship, I thought. How terrible if our friendship had foundered on jealousy. If what was between Annie and me turned out to be a fad, like racketball or needlepoint, each a short season of pleasure and then rapid boredom. Because now I really do have something to talk about. Something I can’t express to Michael or my mother or anyone but Annie. No one but Annie could understand.

  I said, “What’s the definition of a perfect couple, Annie?”

  I’ve missed girls, I thought. You can go on being honest with them. But there’s something about a boy friend. The more your lives entwine, the harder it is to be honest. The more tangled you get, the more complex your thoughts get. Is it because there’s more room for hurt than with a girl?

  “That’s easy,” said Annie. “Price and I are a perfect couple. You and Michael. Look at these maroon legwarmers Price gave me for Christmas. I hate maroon. I don’t have a single thing to go with maroon. I have to buy a whole new outfit just to put Price’s legwarmers on.”

  I lay down on her bed, with its old ragged cotton bedspread, and stared up at the ceiling. “Annie, do you ever feel—oh, I don’t know—do you ever feel—”

  “Why, Fraser MacKendrick, English virtuoso, at a loss for words! But to answer your indirect question, yes. I always feel these days. I feel Price’s lips, hands, hair, chest—”

  “I don’t mean that, Annie. I’m serious. Really serious. I meant, is this what you had in mind? All those years we daydreamed?”

  “Absolutely. It’s perfect. All I have to do is coach Price in color combinations.” Her voice was warm, like the low notes on her violin. “The first time we kissed,” Annie told me, “I felt my entire life shift. Like an instrument changing keys.”

  “But did you want it to shift that much?” I sat up. Annie sleeps in a flock of pillows. I gathered several of them in my arms, and spoke while I hugged them to me. “Annie, sometimes I don’t even want to hear Michael’s voice on the telephone.”

  “How strange,” said Annie. “Does Michael have some dreadful flaw in his character that I haven’t noticed?”

  “No, no. He’s wonderful. I think it’s me.” I was desperate for Annie to understand. But she seemed so blank to me—so removed. As if Price counted, but her best friend, Fraser, that girl she used to play with on the back steps, was someone she only vaguely remembered.

  “What about you? Your teeth are straight. Your figure is a model’s dream. Your hair is satin honey.”

  “Not my body, Annie. Not Michael’s body either. I just sometimes feel overpowered.”

  Annie laughed. “I love it. The cover of adult romances. Where the masterful man stands behind the delicate shoulder of the helpless girl and you can’t decide if he’s going to lead her astray or guide her into happiness ever after.”

  There is nothing worse than trying to express a profound thought and having the other person not catch on. You feel stupid, and you feel angry, and what’s worse, you really do feel helpless. Words aren’t going to get you anywhere. “I’m not helpless, Annie. You don’t understand. It just doesn’t feel one hundred per cent right to me. I have all these doubts about it—about me, about Michael and me.”

  “Oh, Fraser,” said Annie, and the irritation surfaced in her voice instead of mine. “There’s no such thing as one hundred per cent right. The finest musical performance in the world could still be improved. The best paper ever written could still include more information. Michael is as close to perfection as boys come. You should be thrilled. It’s so annoying to have you get so picky every time we turn around. What in the world is there for you to be discontented about?”

  I got off the bed. Annie has two full-length mirrors, so she can see herself from any angle. I caught my expression in them. I looked fretful. Whining. Like the little kids at Toybrary when their mothers won’t let them take out toys with 498 pieces.

  “Your complexion is perfect,” said Annie. “Stop worrying.”

  “It’s not my complexion, Annie. It’s life.”

  “Believe me, Fraser, this life beats the one where we hung around a gazebo exchanging watermelons and pretended that life was splendid without boys.”

  She began talking about Price, about their plans for the future, about college and marriage.

  I felt like a child Kit Lipton’s age. Still bogged down in roller skates, ballerina costumes, Barbie Dolls and bubble bath. It was Annie who had crossed the line into adulthood: into that pairing-off that everybody, from my mother to Lynn to Judith, strived for. I was still a child.

  I looked around Annie’s room and saw that many of the watermelons had made way for photographs of Price, for dinner menus where she had eaten with Price, for a faded corsage Price had given her.

  We really are just watermelon friends now, I thought. Friends left over from grade school. Friends who skinned their knees together and learned jumprope rhymes together and practiced putting on mascara together back when they still weren’t allowed to wear makeup out of the house.

  I’m the one who’s immature, I thought. All this time I prided myself on being mature. I was the organizer. The one who gave speeches and mustered group efforts and rallied people to work with me. Annie was the simple-minded violinist who tagged along.

  I had it backward. Annie’s the adult. Look at her with Price. I can’t share that much. My whole life? Are they kidding? They really want me to take my entire life and fold it into Michael’s like one strand of a braid?

  I’m like a spill, I thought. Michael is like a paper towel.

  If I lie down next to him, I’ll be absorbed, until I’m nothing but Michael. Except that Michael is perfect. I’ve never known a boy as wonderful.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” said Annie, but I had not been listening, and I did not know what reminded her of something. “I stumbled on a Christmas present I made for you and forgot to give you. Oh, well. You can save it for next year.”

  She handed me a tiny tree ornament. It was circular gold with a scrap of cross-stitch in it. I hoped she had dated it, because my watermelon collection was so extensive I tended to forget what arrived when. “Why, thanks, Annie,” I said, “another wa—”

  But it was not a watermelon.

  In deep electric-blue, tiny delicate crosses said

  MICHAEL AND FRASER

  I ran my fingers around the frame. Round, unending, in wedding-ring gold. I shivered. “You did a lovely job,” I told her.

  But the shiver persisted.

  Chapter 7

  “TERM PAPERS!” TRILLED MR. McGrath musically.

  All teachers have mannerisms. Sometimes you last all year without being irritated; sometimes the irritation sets in September fourth. Mr. McGrath’s habit of singing our assignments had been irking me since about Thanksgiving. “Term papers!” he caroled again, more to himself than to us, as if there was some deep delight in term papers that we could not understand. He’s caroled “T
erm papers!” every February for fifteen years, I thought, and he’ll go on caroling it every February for twenty more. I don’t think I want to be a teacher. I want to do something more exciting than assign term papers to hapless students.

  “We have here,” cried Mr. McGrath, like a priest learning chant, “a list of seventy-five obscure Americans. You will have to do research in order to know which of them you want to research, as you will have heard of none of them. But each, in his or her own special way, contributed something meaningful to the culture, to the inheritance, to the very space that we citizens occupy today.”

  “Ugh,” said the class in unison.

  I looked at the list and was thankful that my science project was wrapped up. Blue-green algae were not destined to be a lifelong passion for me. We returned from the Science Fair prizeless; there were countless exhibits far more original than ours. I had spent most of the weekend tense, because there was a school dance that Michael wanted to go to; and, of course, we missed it.

  The names were in alphabetical order, but other than that there were no clues. I knew I would do a woman, and I read through the names to find women. Even in obscurity, women seemed to do less than men when it came to American history. Only nine of the names were women. If I don’t choose one right now, it’ll get taken, I thought.

  I stared hard at the names, trying to guess by their shape and symmetry which belonged to someone interesting. Annie and I were always attracted by special names. We used to love naming the litters of kittens her mama cat had. I remember one litter of all black kittens we named Rainbow, Crayon, Iris and Daffodil because they weren’t. “I’ll do Eliza Lucas Pinckney,” I announced.

  Mr. McGrath checked her off. She was mine. I looked at her name again and began to feel a strange excitement percolating in me. I didn’t know whether Eliza was an early doctor or a pioneer Congresswoman, whether she had done this in Maine or Oregon, and if it was in 1840 or 1910. I’ll start on Eliza this Saturday, I thought. I’ll drive to the State University Library to research her.

  “The paper will be no more than thirty pages long and no less than twenty,” said Mr. McGrath. “You will use no fewer than ten sources and some of them must be periodicals. The bibliography must be correctly compiled according to the rule book you have from sophomore year. Two points will be deducted for each spelling error. Anyone using an encyclopedia in his bibliography will lose one grade.”

  The classroom was like a chorus, with Mr. McGrath uttering his guidelines and the kids moaning after each one. Little cries of “That’s too much, Mr. McGrath” and “But I’m on the baseball team and I don’t have time for all this” filled the room. Mr. McGrath simply went on caroling, “Term papers!”

  I told Michael about it when we met by Annie’s locker between fourth and fifth period. “I love research,” I said. “It’s so exciting. You find a sentence here and a clue there and you piece this person together. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

  Michael stared at me as if I were insane. “I hate research,” he said emphatically. “I like it all prepared for me, ready to read.”

  “I was thinking I’d get started Saturday. Look Eliza up at the State University Library for a few hours.”

  “But Fraser,” protested Michael, “we were going skiing on Saturday. You can research Eliza any time. Besides, you don’t even know who she is yet. Maybe there’s a biography on her at the local library in Chapman.”

  “I like big libraries. Sitting with all the college kids. Walking past a million books. Anyhow, we’ve been skiing four straight weekends in a row, and it should be clear to you that skiing is not my strong point. You go skiing. I’ll go to the library.”

  Michael sighed. “All right. If you can wait to get started until after lunch, I’ll drive you up.”

  “No, no. You ski. I’ll research alone.”

  “Come on, Fray. We just got out of Computer Club and Madrigals in order to spend time together, and you’re arranging to spend an entire Saturday without me? Be kind. You’re kind to animals. Be kind to me.”

  During a slow period at Toybrary, I crossed the library to look Eliza up in the Dictionary of American Biography.

  Pilsbury … Pinchback … Pinckney, Charles … Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth … Pinckney, Eliza Lucas (1722–1793).

  Oh, good, I thought. Colonial and Revolutionary War. I like that period.

  Eliza turned out to be some woman. At age sixteen she managed three plantations in South Carolina—by herself. She set out live oak trees for future navies. She studied enough law to draft wills for her poorer neighbors. Because her plantations were mortgaged, she had to find a profitable crop. She revived silk culture and directed experiments with flax and hemp. She was the first person in South Carolina to make a success of growing the dye indigo. She was also, said the Dictionary, “popular in Charleston society.”

  I lost interest in anything besides Eliza. She was my kind of person. I tried to imagine her—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen; dancing at the balls in Charleston by night, running agricultural experiments by day. What color is indigo? I thought.

  I could feel her, across the years. Eliza. Even her name sounded strong.

  I thought I was pretty terrific, running Toybrary. Big deal. I didn’t introduce new crops to the New World.

  “Fraser,” interrupted Miss Herschel with extreme annoyance. I jumped. I had been in Colonial South Carolina with Eliza. “All these phone calls on the library line are unacceptable. You tell them to call you at home. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Miss Herschel,” I said. I hate being yelled at. I can’t help feeling that at my age I should be past that. Miss Herschel and I should have a conference if she doesn’t like what I’m doing; she shouldn’t yell at me as if I were nine. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Who is it? I’ll call him back.”

  “For once it isn’t a him. It’s a girl named Connie. She’s still on the line.”

  “Connie! How neat. I haven’t heard from her in ages.”

  “Don’t use my phone to have your reunion,” snapped Miss Herschel, and she stalked off to help a little boy find out about the longest, tallest, hugest and heaviest of all the things that fascinated him. About the only way to keep little boys from checking out war toys is to give them the Guinness Book of Records.

  “Hi, Connie,” I said happily. “How are you? Where’ve you been?”

  “Where have I been?” said Connie. “I’ve been right here. You’re the one who’s been away. In Michael’s arms, presumably. A limited horizon, perhaps, but no doubt a satisfactory one.”

  I laughed. “It’s great to hear from you.”

  Connie giggled. “You make it sound as if I’ve been out of the country for years. Try looking past Michael’s shoulders once in a while. We’re all still here. Listen, though. A few years ago your mother was interested in old bonnets and antique hats, and the Wickfield Museum is having an exhibit. Want to drive over Saturday with my mom and me?”

  “Oh, Connie,” I said. “Either I work on my term paper or I go skiing with Michael. I’d love to go with you, but I can’t.”

  “Oh,” said Connie politely. We went on talking for a few minutes, but there was nothing much to say. I don’t have time for you, was the gist of my response. What a terrible thing for a friend to say, I thought. But I did not know how to retract it. It was true. I didn’t have time for Connie.

  Michael picked me up Saturday to drive to the University Library. I had my notebooks and pens. I like to take notes with a thin blue-tipped felt pen on narrow-lined white loose-leaf paper. If I don’t use that paper and that pen, it doesn’t feel as if I’m really taking notes.

  Michael had borrowed Judith’s car, a tiny old Datsun that was once white, but the Hollander clan, even the new members, are not of the car-washing habit, and now it was a speckled gray.

  Above us the sky was a clear deep blue—a sky pretending to be July, but really icy, frigid, cruel February. So blue. I wondered what color Eliza’s indigo had been—the same e
motional, deep, piercing blue of the sky above me?

  A thin white jet trail split the heavens. A stab of wanderlust cut me and I wanted to be on the plane, breaking sound barriers and going new places. “Michael,” I said, “don’t turn left, we have to get on the Interstate.”

  “We’re not going to the library. There’s something I want to show you on the computer,” he said.

  “Eliza predates computers. Come on, Michael, let’s not waste time. I’m totally not in the mood for computers.”

  “Trust me,” said Michael, and he was smiling a secret sort of smile, and I relented and let him drive on home. We went down to his sacred basement, me in a bad mood, because I wanted to look up at the blue sky and think about Eliza and indigo, and him in a terrific mood because of his computer secret.

  We threaded among the video-game consoles, color television, radios, tape decks, light panel, and of course the modernistic desk that held the microcomputer, its screen and printer. I began to think longingly of Connie’s trip to the museum to see all the old bonnets. Anything would be preferable to pretending interest in Michael’s computer games.

  Michael turned to me eagerly. Oh, God, he was so handsome. Tall and broad, and infinitely appealing when, as now, he was excited. “What I was thinking is this,” he said, bursting with pleasure. “On your history project, we can file your notes on the disc. You won’t have to bother with notebooks and messy papers. When it’s time to write the final copy, we’ll just call everything up on the screen. You can write here with me. The computer will print it out perfectly, and I have a spelling check program too, so you can’t possibly make a spelling error.”

  I stared at him. This is my paper, I thought—about Eliza—the woman I picked. It has nothing to do with Michael.

  “What do you think of these headings?” said Michael. “I put them in after you talked to me last night about Eliza.” He jabbed a few buttons and called upon the screen his ideas for subdividing my paper. No fewer than twenty-three divisions had been provided for: food, dress, weather, climate, family, family history, health, indigo, silk, rice, plantation life, sons, education …