I'm Not Your Other Half: A Cooney Classic Romance

  “Just a guess. You were wonderful with Katurah, but somehow I don’t see you happily on your hands and knees playing with little kids.”

  He had thought about me. Tried to analyze me.

  He changed the subject to one clearly dearer to his heart than Toybrary. His basement. Cellars do not interest me, but Michael’s was full of his electronic equipment, from Betamax to police scanner, from microcomputer to electronic keyboard. There was no way I was going to interrupt our first date together by saying that cellars and electronics bored me equally, so I said things like, “Oh, I’d love to see that” and “Oh, Michael, you have to demonstrate that for me.”

  He even told me about his father’s remarriage. “It surprised me,” said Michael. “Dad was so crushed when Mom divorced him. He said he’d never have a woman in his life again. And there he was, six months later, beaming, laughing, his arm around Judith, phoning the church to set up the wedding.”

  “What did you think about it?” I said.

  He shrugged. “It was hard to have any opinion at all. It never happened to me before. All of a sudden, there we were. This entirely different family, occupying different rooms, having to get along.”

  We talked about Judith and Katurah and his father. His mother seemed very shadowy. It gave me a quiver to talk about divorce, as though just talking about it could make it happen in my own family. My parents? My brother Ben and his wife, Lynn? I changed the subject almost superstitiously and told Michael about Coventry Road and the meadow path that wound among the grape vines and the bittersweet tangles.

  “Very poetic,” he said. “If it had snow on it, I might ski on the path, but woods have no appeal for me otherwise.”

  Well, so much for that, I thought, mentally crossing it off my list of possibilities. I tried not to think about skiing. My coordination reaches its limits with walking. Besides, I can’t afford skiing. The trouble with so many activities is they cost so much. When Ben wanted to have a sailboat, that was it; they couldn’t afford anything else. It was a good thing Lynn was willing to take up boating too.

  “Tell me about your family,” said Michael.

  “Ordinary,” I said, but that was not my opinion at all. I thought my family was wonderful and interesting. I’m backing off, I thought. This is our first date. I can’t start out by hiding myself. That’s no way to be a couple, faking things.

  “Impossible,” said Michael. “I saw you on the Good Morning Show talking about Toybrary, and you were extraordinary. You were wearing some blue shirt and asking for donations of unusual toys. I made up my mind right then I wanted to get to know you.”

  Michael had not come into the library to show Katurah how Toybrary worked. He had brought Katurah for an excuse. To meet me.

  For this boy, I thought, staring at his soft dark hair and his bright eager eyes—eager because of me—for this boy, I believe I could learn to love electronics and skiing.

  It was impossible to pay attention during dinner that night. I was far too wrapped up in my thoughts of Michael and me.

  My brother, Benjamin, and his wife, Lynn, were over. Ordinarily I love their company. I like to hold my nephew Jake (though it seems to me that parents who spent nine months thinking up names could do better than Jake). And I like having coffee afterward. Dad and Ben can’t bear sitting at the table after the eating is done, so Mom and Lynn and I sit there for hours. Sometimes Mom talks about work, and Lynn talks about missing work, and Mom talks about childbirth and Lynn talks about sailing.

  Lynn didn’t even know what a sailboat was before she married Ben. Actually, she was afraid of the water. But Ben’s interests pretty much center around boats, navigation and weather. So, before long, Lynn’s did too. She adopted Ben’s hobbies the way other couples adopt children.

  Lynn had brought a hot casserole, and we were eating in the dining room for a change. There’s an aesthetic pleasure to that room the other rooms lack. Several years ago, Mom joined Needle N Thread, which meets the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. Each year the club does a different kind of needlework together. The first year was crewel embroidery, so our dining-room curtains have a Jacobean flavor. The next year, needlepoint, so all eight chairs have magnificent cushions, three of which Mom designed herself. The year after that was knit lace. The ecru tablecloth looks like something a Colonial governor’s wife might have.

  Mom went back to work when Ben was a sophomore at college. She asked for a typing job at a blue-jeans manufacturer, but they hired her to run the office for the marketing research team. About six months ago she stopped running the office and joined the team itself. The chief result, aside from more money and prestige, is that she’s far more tired. If she didn’t have her needlework, I don’t know what she’d do. It’s her lifeline. Every night she thanks God for dishwashers, disposals, clothes dryers and electric hair curlers and sits down with the latest needlework project.

  “So how were blue jeans today, Mom?” said my brother.

  “We’re getting ripped off around the globe. People reproduce shoddy third-rate jeans with our brand names and …”

  Usually I follow Mom’s stories with interest, because I’m so proud of her—carving out this career—and because the blue-jeans industry fascinates me, but tonight all I could think of was Michael. Michael’s shoulders and Michael’s muscles. Michael’s eyes and Michael’s height.

  “So, Fray,” said my brother. “How’s your love life?”

  I blushed scarlet.

  “That good, huh? Just don’t get in over your head, kiddo.”

  My father snorted. “It’s difficult to imagine Fraser getting in over her head. When I was her age, I had the maturity of a tomato in April. Fraser arrived mature on the vine.”

  Lynn said she thought Jake was getting a tooth.

  Ben said traffic was bad because of road repair.

  Daddy said that although casseroles were good and he was grateful to Lynn for making such a tasty one, he preferred steak.

  Mom and Ben spent ten minutes smoothing that little remark over, and I spent ten minutes thinking about Michael. I planned my entire wardrobe for the next week around what Michael might or might not like. This is ridiculous, I thought. I don’t see him in school. He doesn’t see me either.

  My green chamois shirt, I thought. Over what? My turtleneck with the green hearts? My sweater with the rainbow stripes against the white background?

  “So what’s the latest project in Needle N Thread?” said Lynn.

  “Oh, I’m not in the club any longer,” said my mother.

  I choked on some tuna in the casserole, and my father nodded, as if he had known this was what happened when you had casserole instead of steak, and he whacked me on the back. “Why not, Mom?” I managed at last.

  “It meets Wednesday. And now that your father is no longer keeping the pharmacy open on Wednesdays, I’d rather be home with him.”

  I could not believe it. I absolutely could not believe it. She was giving up her club just because Dad was going to be home watching television? Unreal.

  I thought, if I wear the chamois shirt tomorrow, then I can wear my blouse with the lace cuffs the day after that. I guess you dress up for a crush whether the recipient attends the occasion or not.

  Lynn said that she and Ben were taking up jogging. Maybe Michael and I will take up dancing, I thought. I saw myself wearing a long, lovely gown, with a fitted satin bodice to show off my thin waist. Michael, his arm around me, would …

  Ridiculous. The only dances at Chapman High feature rock bands, and everybody wears jeans.

  Still, Michael and I would do everything together. Like Ben and Lynn, or my mother and father. It would be perfect.

  Suddenly I had to talk to Annie. Sometimes I think I know what a craving for drugs or alcohol must be like, because when the desire to talk privately to Annie hits, nothing else will do. I can’t even speak to other people, even if they’re my parents and brother, because only Annie will understand.

  “
Excuse me,” I said. “I have to phone Annie.”

  I ran to the privacy of my room, dialed the number I literally know better than my own, because I’ve dialed it so many hundreds of times, and sighed with pleasure when Annie said hello.

  Annie lives farther down Coventry Road, in a romantic turreted Victorian Painted Lady, a mansion painted gold with rose-beige trim, brown outlines and vermillion accents. Even the yard is romantic, sloping down through a bank of laurel, opening onto a smooth emerald-green lawn wrapped in white birches. A little stone path flanked by short lavender shrubs leads to a delicate wood-laced gazebo, vined with Climbing Blaze roses and topped with a flying-angel weathervane.

  I was nine and Annie was nine and a half when she moved there. My nine-year-old attitude was that it would be okay to have another girl on Coventry Road, but it would be wonderful to play in that gazebo at last. The previous owners didn’t let kids on their property. So it was with high hopes that I went to meet this Annie Walpole, only to find that wasps nested in her gazebo. I was utterly disgusted. Anyone who kept wasps in her gazebo was no friend of mine. Anyhow, my cousin Hank was coming for a month that summer so I didn’t need Annie.

  My mother felt otherwise. “You need a best friend.”

  “When school starts in September, I’ll look for one,” I promised.

  “Annie is here now. You’re both just drifting around this summer and I want you to get acquainted. Life can’t be savored to its fullest without a good friend.”

  “You don’t have a best girl friend,” I pointed out. My mother’s old college friends were always calling her up, and she was always claiming she couldn’t go; she was doing something with Dad.

  “That’s different,” she said. “I have your father.”

  I felt my cousin Hank could be my best friend, but Mother insisted my best friend was going to be a girl, and the girl was going to be Annie Walpole.

  It was a point of honor to resist.

  Mom and Mrs. Walpole signed Annie and me up for swimming lessons. I cleverly refused to float at Registration and thereby got into Beginners Class while Annie was in Intermediate. Mrs. Walpole sent us down to the corner on errands, but I divided the list and sent Annie to the grocery while I handled the drugstore. Mother even took us to the movies every weekend (a blissful state never to be repeated). However I sat on Mom’s left and Annie sat on her right and the only conversation we had was whether somebody wanted the rest of my Jujubes because I was full.

  Late in August, after Hank had gone home and before school started, during those hot drowsy days when life seems to have come to a pleasant, if sweaty, halt, my brother Ben brought home an enormous watermelon. Annie and I rolled that watermelon all the way down Coventry Road to her house because Annie refused to sit on our steps to eat it since our steps were blistering in the hot sun. Her steps, she said, were in the shade. And your steps, I said, are within striking range of your wasps.

  “Chicken,” she said.

  “Jerk,” I told her.

  We sat on Annie’s back steps and chopped the watermelon with a huge shiny meat cleaver that Mrs. Walpole would never have let us touch if she had been home. For some reason we agreed to eat the entire watermelon and we consumed that melon with a barbaric speed that made the juice dribble down our chins and attracted every stinging insect on Coventry Road.

  “If they sting me, I’m killing you, Annie Walpole,” I said, and I spit a flat black seed like a bullet against her. I can spit farther than that, she said scornfully, and she began a rapid-fire attack on her garage wall.

  We must have spit a thousand seeds that afternoon, and the bees dodged and hummed and the wasps covered the half moons of green and white rind that we had dropped all over the steps, and neither of us got stung even once.

  Which was how Annie and I became friends.

  I never see a watermelon without thinking of Annie. Once in eighth grade, I tried to write an essay about it for English. I got the words down, and they expressed what I wanted to say, but it felt like a trespass. How could I expose our friendship for Mr. Hahn to red-pencil and grade? So I wrote about autumn instead: cider and thick jackets and the kick-crunch of leaves in the street.

  Annie and I took up watermelon collecting. We made quilted watermelon tote bags and needlepoint watermelon glasses cases. We painted watermelons in oil for our bedroom walls and rimmed our mirrors with watermelon stickers. We made watermelon wishes the way other people wished on first stars, or first Mondays.

  “It’s midnight,” said Annie regretfully. “I suppose we should hang up.”

  “We really have said everything there is to say,” I admitted.

  “The forecast tomorrow is for chilly winds,” said Annie. “But, Fraser, it’s definitely going to be a watermelon day again.”

  Chapter 4

  MICHAEL STARED AT ME in amazement. He was still so new to me that I hadn’t seen all his expressions yet. I loved the look of him surprised—the way his eyebrows lifted and his head tilted. “Pick up a log cabin?” Michael repeated dubiously.

  “Some date,” observed Price. “Picking up a log cabin.”

  “It comes in sections,” I said reassuringly. “Bolted together. Once we dismantle it, we should be able to lift it easily.”

  The boys looked nervous. “Fraser,” said Michael, “I’m a weight lifter, and I’d be hard-pressed to pick up a log cabin.”

  I laughed at his pun, and he grinned back, glad I got the joke. He didn’t grin long, though, because he was afraid I was serious about carrying this log cabin around. I could tell he was thinking that either he strained his back and got a hernia, or else he ruined our budding romance by explaining that normal high-school kids did not go around picking up log cabins for fun. I would have kidded the boys along until we got to Cinnamon Ridge, but Annie—typically—couldn’t hold back. “It’s really just a playhouse,” she explained. “Mr. Harte’s children outgrew it, and he’s donating it to Toybrary as long as we haul it off.”

  Michael was visibly relieved.

  “That’s why we need you, Price,” said Annie sweetly. “My car died, and I love you for your van.”

  Price laughed. Annie looked adoringly up at him. Price, being Price, had serious objections to the whole plan. “What kid would want to borrow a cabin?” he said. “I can see a kid borrowing Lincoln Logs or a G.I. Joe set. But a cabin? You two girls are being had. The only thing this guy Harte wants is free garbage removal.”

  “I don’t know,” said Michael reflectively. One of the things I already liked about him was the way he considered everything that came up, instead of waving it off instantly, like Price. “My little sister would love a log cabin. Two weeks of playing pioneer. Brave settler woman. I think a log cabin will be a real hit.”

  Praise God for little sisters like that, I thought. I’d never have met Michael if it wasn’t for his little sister.

  Price shrugged. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

  Cinnamon Ridge was a subdivision cut into the woods—a wilderness of thin gray trunks punctuated by large dark-red, dark-blue or dark-brown houses. At the appointed hour we curved up the driveway that said Harte on the mailbox. But the house was locked, the lights off, the garage empty. We stood uncertainly next to the van, feeling like trespassers, but there in the backyard was undoubtedly the playhouse we had come to get.

  “I always wanted a yard with boulders like this,” said Michael. “So I could ambush people and leap off speeding horses and shoot arrows from behind thick tree trunks.”

  We walked down a narrow path to the tiny clearing where the playhouse was tucked—indeed as if desperate settlers had wearily carved their space in the unknown. Michael and I led. Price and Annie followed. In only three double dates we had fallen into a pattern. Annie talked to Price, I talked to Michael, the four of us talked together. But Annie and I did not talk to each other. I had a sense that we should reserve our private conversations for later, that after all, we could talk to each other any time. But it was most odd to be
with Annie, from whom I had been inseparable for eight years, and not be constantly turning to tell her something. I had to train myself to tell Michael instead. “Did you ever have that yard?” I asked.

  “No. Just a metal swing and a sandbox.”

  It took all Michael’s strength to loosen the rusted bolts. His knuckles turned white, and sweat appeared on his forehead. I loved watching him and he loved showing off. Annie and I could not have done it without him, and he knew it. I guess Price felt his van wasn’t an equal gift to Michael’s strength, so he began carrying the log sections by himself back to the van, resisting any help from us. Annie put the hardware in a little box and wrote directions for reassembly on the lid. I just stood there, feeling cold, vaguely watching distant neighbors put more birdseed in their feeders and intently watching Michael work. “I guess that’s it,” said Michael at last.

  You think you know your best friend. I knew that Annie’s opinion of cheerleaders was close to her opinion of homework assignments—very, very low; Annie often told me that football games would be improved by chamber music at half time—but Annie suddenly burst into a cheer.

  “Yay, rah rah, Michael!” she shrieked, leaping into the air and waving a brown-leafed branch for a pompon. I gaped at her, too astonished to be embarrassed for her. She looked less like a cheerleader and more like a frantic penguin. “Let’s have a cheer for Price!” she screamed. “Give me a P!”

  I could not possibly have participated in her cheer; I was rooted to the spot with humiliation for both of us, but Price promptly jumped up on a big gray rock glittering with mica and bellowed, “P!”

  “Give me an R!” Annie yelled, twirling around him.

  Michael and I looked at each other, and the fact that he was as astonished as I made me laugh, and then we both laughed, and we yelled with Price, “R!” The first yell got rid of my inhibitions. The four of us vaulted crazily around the tiny clearing, whooping and hollering like drunken pagans. Price began a chain dance. He put Annie’s hands on his waist, Michael put my hands on Annie’s, and Michael gripped me. We wound around the woods, tooting like toy trains.