Summer in the City

  My mother had warned me to come prepared for heat. Even in my spaghetti-strap shirt and shorts, I was sweating. I bought a large sparkly clip from a booth and pulled my hair up in a loose ponytail, then purchased a bright pink boa. It was too light to make me hot and felt very girly as it drifted around my shoulders. Maybe this is my summer to try out really girly, I thought, as I worked my way down the Avenue, carefully circumventing the area where my mother would be signing books. The pink flamingo she had mentioned couldn’t be missed, stretching two stories high and attached to a fire escape on the front of a building.

  I was just starting to get hungry when I came upon a parked bus painted to look like a monstrous blue can of Spam. I lost my appetite when I realized people were standing around eating Spam burgers. Next to the bus, kids were bowling, rolling small balls down an alley, trying to knock over stacked cans of Spam. I felt as if I had landed on an alien planet. Why hadn’t my mother chosen New York—didn’t writers go there?

  But then I saw a group of great-looking guys waiting for their chance to bowl, wolfing down the disgusting burgers, laughing and joking and being loud. With them was a Baltimore Hon, a girl as tall as I—check that, a guy! I saw it by the way he wobbled on his high-heeled mules as he crumpled up his drink cup and strode toward a trash can. I watched, smiling to myself, and at that moment, he became aware of me studying him and turned to look back.

  I couldn’t see his eyes—his green rhinestone sunglasses hid them—but he stared at me as if I were the one in drag as a Baltimore Hon. My eyes dropped to his stretchy leopard-print pants, which clung to extremely muscular legs. His feet were stuffed awkwardly into pink mules with fluffy toe pieces. I started to laugh, but he didn’t. He just stared at me, so long that I turned to see if someone else, like Fat Elvis, was standing behind me. There was no one.

  Feeling flirty and free in this city where I knew no one and no one knew me, I smiled and waved the end of my boa. I felt giddy with girl power, as if I had cast a spell on this guy who couldn’t stop staring at me. He suddenly came to his senses, turned, and walked on, but his eyes—his sunglasses—strayed back to me.

  “Hey, hon, watch where you’re going!” one of his friends yelled, but the guy had his eyes on me. He tripped over the street curb. Trying to catch his balance, unsteady on his high heels, he staggered wildly, then sprawled across the pavement. When he sat up next to the trash can, his red beehive wig sat cockeyed on his head. He snatched up his sunglasses, shoving them back on his face as if to keep people from recognizing him. His friends howled with laughter. The guy whirled around and hurled both fluffy pink shoes at them, realizing too late that it made him look like a girl throwing a hissy fit. Now his friends roared louder and others joined in.

  The guy grabbed up his boa with a fierceness that made a flurry of feathers. I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth, but I was shaking with laughter. A big satin rose had tumbled out of his wig, and when he bent over in his leopard pants to retrieve it, it wasn’t a pretty sight. A second rose that had been catapulted from his wig had rolled toward me. I picked it up, but the guy was obviously avoiding further glances in my direction, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  “Excuse me,” I called softly, as if it were possible to get only his attention.

  His friends grinned at me—leered may have been a more accurate word. They realized that I was the one who had distracted him.

  “Hi, hon,” one of them called to me. “What’s your name?”

  Now I became self-conscious and was no more willing than the guy-Hon to cross the twenty-five feet between us.

  “Look, your little sweetie has your rose,” one of his friends told him.

  Despite the guy’s tan, I could see his cheeks coloring. Mine burned as well—“little sweetie”—what was that supposed to mean? The guys had that cocky jock look and were eyeing my extra long legs in an obvious, obnoxious way.

  The Hon glanced over at me. I threw the rose at him like a strike through the heart of home plate, then hurried off in the opposite direction.

  “Baby!” my mother greeted me.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Everyone, this is my baby, Jamie. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Two middle-aged women, a woman grasping the hand of an antsy little kid, and a girl not much older than me smiled and murmured agreement. What else were they going to do—they were waiting in line for her autograph.

  “Very beautiful,” said the man sitting next to my mother at the signing table.

  “Jamie, this is Viktor.”

  Light-haired, blue-eyed, and thirty-something, Viktor rose to shake my hand. Whoa, I thought, is this what romance publishers look like? Then I remembered: Mom called her editor Priscilla.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Viktor said, in an accent that I thought was Swedish. He had a body perfect for modeling skimpy gym wear. Maybe he did publicity for the chick-lit line, I thought—clever marketing!

  “I’ve got a half hour more here, baby. Would you like the house key?”

  “No, I’ll get something to eat and hang out.”

  “Get the crab cakes,” she said, pulling bills from a blue alligator purse as kitschy as those that some of the Hons were carrying.

  “I’ve got money, thanks.”

  I left Mom to her fans, but when I was about thirty feet away, I turned back to look at her, trying to see her the way a stranger would. We had the same green eyes, and the same hair, although hers, dyed now, was a paler yellow than my streaky blond. Standing just five foot five and sporting some big curves, wearing her hair and bangs too long for a woman who was fifty, she looked like a country western singer—or a romance writer, I reminded myself. I watched a woman clutching one of Mom’s books to her breast, talking animatedly. Mom was radiant—she had found her dream.

  Then I saw Viktor watching me watch Mom. His smile was slow and confident and revealed perfectly even, white teeth. Feeling uncomfortable, I moved on.

  I found a booth selling crab cakes, and carried my sandwich and iced tea to an area in front of the festival’s main stage, choosing a seat in the last row. Up front, members of a school band with a color guard were wiping sweat off their faces. Hons of all ages were gathering, some of them practicing their poses, getting ready for the big contest. I scanned the group for my guy-Hon, but he wasn’t there.

  By the time I finished the crab cake, the heat and long drive from Michigan had caught up with me. Feeling pleasantly sleepy, I shut my eyes, soaking up the June sunlight, and thought about “my” Hon. Since he obviously wasn’t enjoying his day in drag, I figured he was being initiated into some group. I wondered what he looked like without the wig and makeup, what kinds of things he liked to do, what his voice sounded like.

  “You’re desperate, Jamie,” I told myself, “when you have romantic thoughts about a guy in high heels.” Still, I tried to imagine what would make him smile and how his laughter sounded….

  I woke up with a start, awakened by a clash of cymbals during the National Anthem. Realizing that I was the only one sitting, I rose hastily to my feet. Something rolled off my lap. I picked up a pink satin rose, the one I had thrown back at my Hon. Quickly I looked around, but he was nowhere in sight.

  I studied the rose, then attached it to my shirt, wrapping its wire base around my strap. The rose was old, which made it seem as if it had once been special to someone. I touched its fabric gently, lovingly. Dropping it in my lap was the most romantic thing a guy had ever done for me.

  Chapter 3

  “WE WANT TURTLE SOUP,” I read from a sign that hung in a window that may have been Mom’s or may have belonged to the house next door. It was hard to tell. The series of houses that grew out of the pavement on Chestnut Avenue had one long Formstone front that appeared to ripple, with two windows bowing out, followed by a flat area for an entrance, the pattern repeating itself over and over down the block.

  Mom laughed. “Three boys from Hopkins University rent that house, although on
ly two are here this summer. Hopkins has a great lacrosse team, and their rival is your new team, the Maryland Terrapins—turtles. We’ll have to get one of those signs that reads FEAR THE TURTLE to hang in our window. You’re going to like this town, baby. Sports are big.”

  So Dad had said, right after he explained rather sheepishly that he had signed me up for a lacrosse camp at a local high school. The camp’s brochure had photographs of an exclusive private school and promoted its program as “excellent for girls with the potential to tap athletic scholarships to Ivy League colleges.” Dad had tried to get me into a college camp, but I didn’t have the game experience required. I had played only one-on-one with Dad. Apparently, in Maryland, where he grew up, they started lacrosse at the age of three.

  “Well, come on in,” Mom said. Viktor and I followed her, each of us carrying two cartons of clothes from my car. I wondered when Viktor would change out of his revealing cropped T-shirt and skintight jeans into something more comfortable and hop his train back to New York.

  “Why don’t I fix us something cool and healthy to drink?” he suggested.

  “Wonderful idea!” my mother replied, setting down my overnight bag, then waving her hands around the living room. “Well…how do you like it?”

  I glanced around. The room had mauve walls and a high ceiling with a fan whose paddles were shaped and painted like palm leaves. Lace curtains hung from the windows that bowed out to the street and stretched almost from ceiling to floor. Festoons of gaudy artificial flowers draped the top of them and hung along their sides. A gray velvet sofa and chair were smothered in shiny purple-and-pink pillows. The silk shades of two floor lamps were lilac-colored and fringed. A third lamp dangled little crystals. Candles lined the mantel of the fake fireplace, their fragrance so strong it made my eyes water. There were flowers there, too, bouquets of them stuffed around the candles, and my graduation photo, framed in a heart, looked like it sat on an altar. It was the tackiest, girliest room I had ever seen.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Wait till you see the rest!” my mother responded happily.

  “Maybe she wants to see the bathroom first, Rita,” Viktor said. “Upstairs, down the hall, nearly at the end.”

  He met the surprise in my eyes with a slow-spreading smile. He had said that on purpose. People who easily described where the bathroom was spent a lot of time in a place—he wasn’t hopping a train to anywhere.

  I looked quickly at Mom.

  “I’ll get the drinks,” said Viktor.

  “Mom?” I asked, when he had disappeared through the series of rooms that made up her long narrow house.

  “Yes?” she said, trying to look as if she had no idea what I was going to ask.

  “Who is he?”

  “You’ll like him, Jamie. He’s athletic like you. He works as a personal trainer.”

  “Your personal trainer?”

  She blushed a little. “I’m one of his clients. He works at my health club.”

  “I see.” Oh, did I see, and this time, there was no place to run. I had rejected Dad and Chrissy the Counselor; now I was stuck with Mom and Viktor the Studly Swede. But wasn’t I the one turning eighteen? Wasn’t it my turn for romance?

  “Would you like to use the bathroom?” my mother asked, sounding almost apologetic.

  “I guess so.” Now that I was prepared for shaving cream on the sink, why not?

  My mother picked up my overnight bag and I followed her, carrying two cartons of clothes, struggling to get up a set of steps that ran behind the living room and were just wide enough to allow me to keep my elbows.

  I glimpsed a bedroom to the left that emitted a kind of pink glow, and turned right down a narrow hall. Mom entered the room at the end of the hall and set down my bag. “You’ll be sleeping in my office,” she said. “The bathroom is right next door.”

  “Your office! Mom, you don’t want me in your work space.” But she didn’t want me in her bedroom, either, I realized, for that was crowded enough. “I thought you had three bedrooms.”

  “I do, but the middle one is full of boxes.”

  “Well, how about the basement?”

  “I guess you’ve never been in the basement of an old city house,” my mother replied. “I have a laptop, Jamie, and really, I move all over the place. I just keep my things here. The daybed is very comfy.”

  The daybed was covered with a leopard-print spread, and the two windows, which looked out the back of the house, had leopard-print valances. The walls were lime green. I figured the furry black-and-white striped pillows were supposed to be zebra skins and touched them gingerly.

  “Like it, baby?”

  “It’s, uh, kind of jungle-y.”

  She beamed. “That’s exactly what I was aiming for, a little excitement, a stroll on the wild side.”

  “All right, wild women, your juices are ready,” Viktor said, his voice startling me. He must have padded down the hall on panther paws.

  Mom giggled up at him, then winked at me. I wondered if the Hopkins students next door would allow me to use their third room.

  “I’ll be down in minute, okay?”

  “Sure, hon,” said my mother, slipping into Baltimore talk.

  I used the bathroom, which contained enough soaps, perfumes, and lotions to supply an entire women’s dorm, then returned to my new room.

  Doors had been removed from the double closet opposite the back windows, and my mother used the area as a writing alcove, her desk chair facing in, the three walls lined with photographs of buildings and rooms on a Southern estate, floor plans, a town map, a calendar—the world of her latest novel, I realized. Post-its were stuck on her laptop, her walls, the edge of her desk, and on an area by the daybed, where she must have been sitting and thinking. I read some of the ideas and descriptions jotted on them; if someone had been looking over my shoulder, I would have blushed. Mom sure had a way with words.

  In one corner of her room were three large frames with poster-size copies of the covers from her first three books. Big-bosomed women were being swept into the arms of iron-breasted men. I hadn’t read her books; it’s one thing to read Nora Roberts’s plots of romance and lust, it’s another to read your mother’s.

  Well, I couldn’t hide up here forever. After checking out the middle bedroom, which was filled with large boxes, then my mother’s bedroom, which glowed like a sunset, and which, to my relief, had a gym bag and shaving kit, suggesting that Mom’s personal trainer stayed overnight but wasn’t a full-time resident, I headed downstairs.

  I found Viktor and Mom in the backyard, sipping some kind of healthy concoction he had made. A third frothy glass of reddish stuff waited for me.

  Studying Viktor in the bright sunlight I could see that, while his body was probably twenty-five years younger than Mom’s, his face was maybe just fifteen. Still, that was quite a difference in age, given that guys (my father, for instance) usually went for younger women.

  I sipped the drink, which smelled like cabbage, then held the glass against my cheek, the cold concoction feeling a lot better than it tasted.

  “Who would ever guess that vegetables could taste so good,” my mother commented, swirling the cubes in her glass.

  All I could think was, If he’s poisoning her, she’ll never be able to tell.

  “So,” said Viktor. “Your mother tells me you are a fabulous athlete.”

  “I’m good enough,” I said.

  “Baby, you won a full athletic scholarship to Maryland.”

  “What is your sport?” Viktor asked, as if he hadn’t been studying my long legs the way I had been studying his skin in an effort to determine his age.

  “Basketball.”

  “Maybe you would like some free passes to the Club,” he said.

  “The Club?”

  “That would be lovely,” Mom gushed. “We could work out together, Jamie.”

  I tried to picture the two of us side by side in stretchy little exercise outfits, the same face, on
e body short and curvy, the other tall and lean: We’d look like cartoon characters.

  “Of course, you could come alone,” Viktor told me. “I’ll get you some passes. I’d be glad to design a regimen for you.”

  “I, uh, already have a regimen from my coach at Maryland,” I replied.

  “Oh? I’d be very interested in seeing it.”

  “What I mean is, she’s sending me one. I guess it hasn’t come in the mail yet,” I said to Mom.

  “No, hon.”

  His slow, even smile told me Viktor knew I was lying. He glanced at his watch. “I should be going, Rita,” he said, his accent making her name distinct. “Stay where you are, my lovely, I’ll get my things and let myself out the front.”

  He rose and—did I imagine it?—made sure I was watching as he planted one very long kiss on my mother’s mouth.

  I turned to watch a neighbor across the alley taking out the garbage.

  When I turned back, he had left, and Mom’s face was bright, with pleasure rather than embarrassment, I thought.

  “How do you like him?” she asked.

  “He’s not really my type, Mom, but then, he’s your boyfriend.”

  She leaned toward me, and I smelled her jasmine. “What is your type, Jamie?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “But surely there are guys you have been interested in. What about that young man you dated at the beginning of junior year?”

  Oh, yeah, him, the one I had fallen for big-time, never guessing that his one desire was to make varsity, and he figured that dating the coach’s daughter would help.