All We Know of Love

  I have never been good at saying good-bye. Never. But it strikes me as odd that I feel this way about a woman I met three hours ago. A woman I will never see again. I mean, I guess there’s a chance, but the odds are millions, billions to one that our lives will cross again. So why?

  Why do I feel anxious that she is leaving?

  And sad.

  “Look, little lady,” she is saying to me. She is standing in the aisle. No one else, it seems, is getting off here. The whole bus is waiting, but Charlene doesn’t seem to care. She talks as slowly and for as long as she wants. I like that about her. You’ve got to admire that.

  “You take care of that shoulder now,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Your pitching arm.” She smiles at me. “And the whole rest of yourself, when you figure that out.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “You know what I’m talking about.” But she doesn’t move away. “Stand up now,” Charlene orders me.

  I do, and she puts her arms around me. She smells like floral perfume, and when I look at her face, really look at her, I see she is beautiful. Sometimes I am uneasy hugging people, grown-ups especially, but Charlene doesn’t have any room for that. She does all the hugging, and she does the letting go when she’s good and ready.

  “I’ll take care of myself. I will, Charlene,” I tell her. “I promise you.”

  The driver had gotten off the bus to get her suitcase out. Now he’s waiting by the door, waiting to get going again, like everyone else on the bus.

  “Don’t promise me, girl,” Charlene says.

  And she is gone.

  Along with the hum of the bus engine, the smells of food, and human bodies too long without fresh air, I am alone again, and I allow myself to drift into a daydream world of partial memories and partial fantasy, all involving Adam, until the bus begins to lurch in a series of staccato spasms.

  I wonder if there is something wrong with the bus.

  I try to ignore this and linger in the feeling of Adam touching me while it is still alive in my mind. My skin tightens and trembles as if it is real, even as my brain and my heart know it is not.

  This bus is really making odd noises.

  I open my eyes and look out the window as the driver pulls off the highway at the first exit. The bus slows to a stop along a busy stretch of the service road. I see a bunch of gas stations and two fast-food restaurants, a video store, a Kmart, and across the street is a diner that sits slightly apart. OUR DOG HOUSE, the sign on the roof reads.

  It looks like a house really, a house with a trailer attached and a sign on its roof in the shape of a giant hot dog.

  The driver tells us he needs to stop the bus. He tells us not to get off, he’ll only be a minute, and if something is wrong he’ll radio for another bus. But after about ten minutes with the sun beating through the windows, a bunch of people get up anyway and are standing around the side of the road.

  I am one.

  I should probably call my dad, but I don’t have a good enough signal. As I walk toward the end of the bus and then a little more toward the street, I get another bar on my cell phone.

  It turns out I get the best reception right inside Our Dog House, which it turns out is somebody’s house with a trailer attached. The trailer part is the diner. There is a long counter with stools and some booths against the far wall. There is one person working: a young girl behind the counter.

  Now I can call my dad and pretend I am on my way to Vermont. I know parents like to think that cell phones have allowed them to keep better track of their teenagers, but they are always a few steps behind.

  My dad doesn’t answer, so better still, I leave a message and then shut my phone off to save power.

  “You gonna order something?” The girl behind the counter talks to me.

  And suddenly I realize I am nauseous, or hungry again. All I’ve had is half a bologna sandwich and a carrot stick since six thirty this morning.

  “Yeah,” I answer, taking a seat on one of the round red stools.

  The waitress hands me a menu, but I already know what I want, and I order it. It is what I always order in a place like this: grilled cheese on white and a chocolate milk shake. My mom and I used to get the exact same thing every time we went to the diner on the post road in Westport on my way to Hebrew school. Every Wednesday for two years, grilled cheese and a chocolate milk shake. She got the same thing, except she had tomato on her grilled cheese, and instead of a milk shake she got a chocolate egg cream, which has neither eggs nor cream.

  “You know what?” I say suddenly. “Can I change that? Can I have an egg cream instead? Chocolate?”

  “A what?”

  I forgot. You don’t have to go too far out of the tristate area before no one has ever heard of an egg cream. I read the signs as we crossed the state lines. Delaware for a split second and now we are in Maryland. No egg creams.

  “Nah, forget it. I’ll just have water.”

  As the waitress is talking to me, I realize she probably isn’t much older than I am. I’m almost sixteen. Maybe she’s seventeen. Maybe. She seems kind of unhappy to be where she is, which is OK because I am feeling pretty much the same.

  “Grill cheese and a water . . .” She hurries off to take someone else’s order.

  I am just sitting, letting my knees knock against the back of the counter, letting the stool rock one way and then the other, waiting for my sandwich. The stool makes a funny squeaking sound when it spins left and a thunking noise when it stops forward again. I’d liked going to Hebrew school, which is pretty weird in itself. Maybe I just liked the special time with my mom. I had her all to myself. There were no phones to answer. She couldn’t go lie down in her room with the door shut. She couldn’t fight with my dad or stare at the TV. She’d ask me about school, about my homework, my friends.

  I remember I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I wanted to be just like her. She had long hair — blond, kind of thin and wispy. Pieces of it would be lifted upward at the slightest wind. When the afternoon light came right in through the large windows by our booth, her hair would look like a halo. She was tiny, my mom. Thin, small-boned. Tiny, like you wanted to pick her up and carry her away. Frail, like she wanted to be picked up and carried away.

  Not like me at all.

  I was never tiny. I am tall, but not because I have long, modelly legs. I am just tall. I wore a size eight-and-a-half shoe by the time I was in eighth grade. I was born with a thick head of dark brown hair that just got thicker and curlier every year.

  I’m pretty sure I was born big.

  One thing I do know for certain: I was born by mistake.

  If it hadn’t been so hard to find, I might have thought that my mother left this one thing behind on purpose. I might have thought I was meant to find it. It was just a month or so after she left.

  At first glance it was just a shoe box; size five shoe, my mother’s tiny feet. Dented cardboard. Color: rich brown.

  Sarah and I had to make a diorama for sixth-grade American History. We hadn’t gotten to choose our subject. We had to make a visual representation of the Bon Homme Richard, which is a boat or a battle or a revolutionary war hero, and that’s about all we knew. We had some old Playmobil army figures, miniature British and American flags, and a crude silhouette of an eighteenth-century battleship made of paper, and now we needed a box to house our miniature project.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “There.” I was pointing far into the recesses of my dad’s closet. Way in the back, in the places you never look unless you had waited the entire three weeks to begin a project that was now due tomorrow and you were desperate.

  Sarah was on the floor, poking around, and I was on a chair, looking on the top shelf of the closet. I could see, behind all the old suits, a stack of boxes hidden by a pile of old sweaters.

  “Where?” she asked again, looking up.

  “Wait, I see it. I’ll
get it.” I stretched onto my tippy-toes. I closed my eyes and turned my head so I could get my arm in as far as it would go and pulled out a cardboard box. Our project was only another half an hour or so to completion. Sarah smiled and took the box from my hands.

  “But it’s got stuff in it,” she said. She had lifted the lid.

  “So what?” I said. “We’ll throw it out, or we can stuff it back in the closet again. Nobody’s looked back there in about a hundred years.” I figured it was an old pair of shoes or a nasty holey sweater, old ties. Something like that.

  “Yeah, funny, a hundred years, like since John Paul Jones.” Sarah laughed.

  “Who?”

  She shot me a look that said she had done her Bon Homme Richard research and I had not. But I owned the old Playmobil toys and I had drawn the paper boat, so fair’s fair.

  It seemed like the contents were just old envelopes and yellowing papers, but when I looked closer, I saw official-looking documents. The one on the very top as I lifted it all was folded into thirds, facing out. Department of Health Services, it read. License and Certificate of Marriage.

  Sarah looked from the paper to my face and back again. She was one of the only people who knew about my mother. Sarah and, of course, my grandmother, and my father’s best friend, Joel, Uncle Joel. But surprisingly it never came up. The school didn’t really know. Teachers didn’t know.

  A Gordon family don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. And they never really asked.

  It makes it easy. People don’t ask about what they don’t really want to know. People don’t really want to know what doesn’t involve or matter to them. My dad came in for all the conferences, the plays. He signed all my permission slips and report cards.

  We just became a family of two, instead of three.

  No biggie.

  I unfolded the paper while Sarah read over my shoulder.

  Legal fee: $3.00 — Certified Copy was stamped across the whole thing. I let my eyes wander over the words, the dates, the ages. Maiden name. County of. City of. Education. My mother was twenty-three years old. My dad was thirty-four. They were married May 19th. I guess I knew that. I remembered the anniversary gifts. Flowers. Babysitters. Dinner out. Dinner in.

  It was Sarah who brought it up.

  “Hey, isn’t your birthday in November?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So look, your parents were married only six months before you were born.” And then she stopped, like she had said something wrong. But I still didn’t get it.

  “So?”

  “Nothing.”

  I folded the paper back up and took the whole handful, and I was about to shove it back into the closet. I wanted to get back to the American Revolution and John Paul Jones, who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Or maybe he said, “I regret I have but one life to live for my country.” Or maybe he didn’t say anything. Maybe he just dropped dead.

  Oh.

  I got it.

  My mother was three months pregnant when she got married. She had never wanted to get married in the first place. She had to. So much for love. My mother had never wanted me. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me that day.

  I was a mistake, one mistake that led to another.

  No wonder she left.

  I finally got it.

  When my grilled cheese comes, there are three crinkle-cut pickle slices on the plate beside it. And the sandwich itself looks a little flatter, a lot greasier than I think I can handle right now. More like a slice of pizza than a sandwich, and I don’t feel the least bit hungry anymore.

  “You don’t like it?” the waitress asks, the way a mother would, which strikes me as sort of funny but nice; she’s just a kid like me. I guess being a waitress is like being a mother, sort of. With tips.

  “Oh, no. I’m just not as hungry as I thought.”

  Then as if my answer were an invitation, the waitress leans back against the sliding-glass doors of the dessert display right behind her. She lets out a long sigh, almost a parody of exhaustion.

  If this girl had a cigarette, I imagine she’d be smoking. She kind of looks like the type of girl who smokes.

  “So,” she says to me. “Where are you going?”

  “Going?” I ask. I turn around to look out the window. I can see the bus and even more passengers lined up along the street. Maybe nowhere, I think.

  “Yeah, well, everybody who comes in here is going somewhere. If you lived around here, you’d know better. Plus, I know pretty much everybody from here.”

  “Florida,” I say. “To see my mother.”

  Back at school, there were always those girls who started smoking early, the skinny ones with black eyeliner and belly rings who gathered in the parking lot before first period. The black nail polish type. Although they’d surprise you. Sometimes you’d see a cheerleader out there, or an honor student blackening her lungs with seductive tendrils of smoke. It keeps you skinny, they tell me.

  The waitress smiles. “I wish I could go to Florida.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’d go anywhere,” she says. “But I can’t.”

  That’s when I notice the ring on her finger, on her third finger, left hand. A wedding band. She walks away to give someone their check, and when she comes back, she returns to the same spot and exact stance, as if she stands there a hundred times a day. Arms folded, ankles crossed, leaning directly in front of the slices of pie, bowls of rice pudding, and half globes of cantaloupe covered in cellophane.

  I still haven’t touched my sandwich, and I don’t want her to ask me about it again. So I say, “Are you married?”

  She looks down at her hand. She spreads her fingers and sort of wiggles them around.

  “Yup.”

  “That’s nice.” How lame can I be?

  “You don’t mean that,” she says, but she isn’t angry. She steps toward the counter and leans on her elbows. She looks tired.

  “No, I do. I mean . . .” I go on. “I think if you really love someone, you can meet them now just as easily as later, right? I mean, how do you know?”

  “You don’t,” she says.

  I started feeling that this girl could have just been one of my friends, even with all that blue eye shadow, even with that wedding ring. Maybe we rode the school bus together for years. We were never in any of the same classes and didn’t see each other outside of school, but we are really close friends. Summer friends. And neighborhood friends. Or just bus friends.

  Oh, right, my bus is outside.

  I wonder if it’s fixed yet, or what?

  “Hey, can I just take this with me?” I say suddenly.

  “Sure, I’ll wrap it up,” she says, sliding the plate back toward her. “By the way, I’m Lorraine.”

  “I’m Natalie,” I say, turning my head to look again out the window, the window that looks out across the highway, to the gas stations and the video store, the doughnut chain and the pancake house, and I watch as a long silver bus, the one with the picture of the running dog on the side, the one on its way from Connecticut to Florida, gathers speed and moves off with the flow of traffic.

  Lorraine sat and watched the PBS special flicker on the screen in the darkened classroom. “There are fifteen different words for snow in the Eskimo language,” the narrator began. “Snowflake, frost, fine snow, drifting particles, clinging particles, fallen snow on ground . . .”

  And so on.

  Lorraine let herself fall into the movie as the camera passed over the frozen, nearly bluish glaciers, dipping and rising along the rounded formations. She was tired in a way she had never been before. After weeks of running to the bathroom between every class, even getting up in the middle of the night to check for her period, for drops of red, Lorraine finally bought a test kit — the most expensive, most accurate one. She had driven two towns over to find a pharmacy where no one would know her.

  The results had been pink — positive.

  Lorraine knew now (no matter what she dec
ided to do about this) that she was forever separate from her classmates, though she could hear them talking behind her. When they realized their teacher was absent, most of the kids had cut out completely. The rest were fooling around in the back of the room. One kid even lit up a cigarette. The substitute teacher that day was too afraid to say anything. She just sat there pretending to be really interested in the documentary.

  And so on.

  Crust on fallen snow. Fresh fallen snow on the ground. Fallen snow floating on water. There was whiteness everywhere, falling from the sky, suspended in the wind. “There could be no one single word for something as important as snow,” the narrator went on. “It would be like a human infant being referred to just as ‘baby’ for his or her entire life. Language defines culture.”

  Lorraine instinctively reached down and rubbed her belly. It was flat. Flat as it ever had been. It seemed nearly impossible, and yet, of course, it was entirely possible.

  Three more kids left the room. Lorraine turned around and watched them go. The room brightened when they slipped out, then returned to darkness with the click of the shutting door. Dust hung suspended in the long beam of light that stretched from the projector to the screen. Lorraine let her eyes settle into a blur, staring at the movie.

  “For example,” the voice intoned, “do we call a buttercup a weed or a flower?”

  A weed or a flower?

  “Is it defined by its beauty or its wildness?”

  What words would define me now? Lorraine thought. Carson had used the word love. He had told her he loved her many times. There should really be at least a few more words for love in the English language. Maybe it would help clear things up a little. Prevent these kinds of things from happening.

  Certainly the love she felt for her parents was a different love altogether from the love she felt for Carson. And the love she had for reading and dreaming of all the places she would travel. Perhaps the love Carson felt for her was just slightly different from the love she felt for him. If there had been another word, a more perfect word, maybe things would be better understood. Suddenly, Lorraine felt unbelievably hungry, almost a burning, though she knew no food would be satisfying.