Hard Love

  “Mom, I need the car for a little while, okay?” God, she was sitting in the dark again. I thought that was over with now that she had Al to replace Dad. She’d spent the better part of five years, evenings anyway, sitting on that scratchy old couch in the dark. “Resting” is what she called it, but it seemed to me more like burying herself alive. But then, this past winter the lights went on again, which had been a relief mostly, except that now there was usually this bald guy sitting on the couch next to her, pretty damn close too, grinning like a skinhead Mr. Rogers.

  “It’s awfully late to go out, Johnny,” she said. She’d say it was awfully late to go out if it was noon.

  “It’s only eight thirty. I have to get something copied for school tomorrow. Where’s Al?”

  “He’s not coming over tonight. I’m … thinking about things.”

  “You didn’t …? He’s not …?” God, if that creep dumped her …

  “No. It’s not that.” She reached out and switched on a lamp, which made us both blink. “The thing is, Al asked me to marry him.” A twitchy smile kept coming and going while she talked.

  “Oh.” No surprise—I figured it was coming. And what the hell were you supposed to say when your mother made an announcement like that? “I knew he would. I mean, he seems like the type who’d want to get married. He was married before.”

  She kept on twitching. “Yup, we’re both used goods.”

  “Oh, Mom.” I started booting the wall with my sneaker. Damn! I hated it when she said stuff like that, feeling so sorry for herself. People got divorced all the time. Practically everybody I knew had divorced parents. Lots of them anyway. It was a fact of life. Why couldn’t she get used to it? I had.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He’s been wonderful to me. I thought my life was over, but Al brought me back.”

  More yuck. I also couldn’t stand it when she got confidential with me; I really didn’t want to know more than I had to about her relationship with old Al. “Well, I guess you’d better marry the guy then,” I said.

  She laughed. “Easy for you to say. Ever heard the saying, ‘Once burned, twice shy’?”

  “No.” How much of this conversation should I have to endure just to drive the car half a mile?

  She picked a piece of hard candy from the dish on the coffee table and twisted the cellophane tighter around the sour ball. “If I marry him, I’m leaving myself wide open again. What’s to stop him from doing the same thing your father did?”

  I banged the manila envelope against my leg. “Mom, the store’s gonna close. Could we discuss this another time?”

  She stared at me, but I had the feeling she was seeing somebody else, maybe somebody standing right behind me. It creeped me out a little bit. “We used to be close when you were younger. Before things got bad with your father. Do you remember?”

  “Mom,” I whined. I wished I could disappear when she got onto these topics.

  “Now you can’t give me five minutes of your precious time. Whom am I supposed to talk to about this? My fifth grade class?”

  “What do you want me to say? I hardly know the guy. How can I tell you what to do?”

  “Al’s tried to get to know you.”

  “Look, I don’t have time to get to know people, okay? Al’s already got a son and I’ve already got a father. Why complicate things?”

  She sighed and looked unhappy, which was nothing new. But, of course, I’m immune to it. “Keys are in my coat pocket in the hall. Drive carefully. The life you save may be mine.”

  Thou scurvy tickle-brained hell-hated lunatic.

  Thou lascivious weather-bitten flap-ear’d strumpet.

  Thou churlish fen-sucked maggot pie.

  Thou dizzy-eyed hedge-born canker-blossom.

  Thou puppy-headed beslubbering flax-wench.

  Thou peevish ill-nurtured milksop.

  That last one fit me pretty well. Peevish ill-nurtured milksop. Marisol had made up a list of insults using Shake-spearean language for which I could imagine numerous possible uses. It made the insults even better that the insultees wouldn’t have a clue what you were saying. You could mix and match to suit the situation. I could think of several beslubbering fen-sucked canker-blossoms I now had the vocabulary to slander.

  The more I read her stuff, the more I couldn’t wait to meet Marisol. And I would too, as long as she was telling the truth on the inside cover of Escape Velocity #1. “If you like this zine and would like to have issue #2, send one dollar and two stamps to the address below, or stop by Tower Records on Newbury Street after Saturday, March 2. Free copies in the entryway.” The address was a post office box in Cambridge, but the other information surely meant that she would be bringing the zine to Tower Records sometime Saturday when I would be there waiting.

  I flipped to the back page of Escape Velocity and read again, for probably the twentieth time, the definition of the zine’s title. “Escape velocity: the speed at which a body must travel to escape the gravitational pull of another body.” I loved thinking about it—that moment when you got free, when you were going so fast you left them all behind. And I kept picturing this girl, Marisol, large and muscular probably, outrunning a tornado or something, jumping off a garage roof and actually flying.

  “Your copies are ready, kid.” The woman leaned across the counter to look at me sitting on the floor. “Fifty. Fresh and warm.”

  I stood up as she rang the numbers into the machine.

  “You a writer?” she asked me. “You write this stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’d you write it for? Your girlfriend?”

  Who would ask a total stranger a nosy question like that? People were always saying stuff that made you wonder if they’d ever had a successful conversation in their lives.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have a girlfriend. I wrote it for anybody who wants to read it. I wrote it for myself.”

  She shook her head, but smiled. “Kids,” she said, as though she had a special insight into the species; then, as I tucked the pages under my arm to leave, she kept the nightly news coming. “Good luck, Giovanni,” she said. “You’re a good kid.” Now, where the hell does she get off saying something like that?

  Chapter Two

  It was eleven already. I’d been standing in the entryway since the minute the store opened at ten o’clock, and I was beginning to feel pretty conspicuous. One of the clerks behind the counter kept giving me suspicious looks. I considered sitting down and reading one of the other zines stacked around me so I looked like I was doing something useful, but what if I got absorbed in an article and Marisol came in, dropped off the new Escape Velocitys and took off before I realized it?

  My stack of Bananafish copies looked pretty low-budget compared to some of the stuff piled on the floor. Still, a couple of kids had come by and picked one up along with a few other zines. I didn’t say anything. For instance, I didn’t say, “I wrote that one,” like some egotistical dork who thinks he’s a celebrity because he stapled some pages together. My address was inside; they could write me a note and tell me if they liked it. Or if they hated it—that could happen, too.

  I looked out the window trying to guess which people might be coming into the store, which girl might be Marisol. But as people kept zooming past I got a headache, a twin to the one I had the night before at dinner. Of course, that was nothing new; I always got a headache on Friday nights, but it usually lifted as soon as my father dropped me off at his condo in Back Bay and left. Good old Dad always manages to have pressing commitments on weekend nights: charity benefits, literary events, parties given by important people he can’t afford to miss. Every week. What a joke.

  Probably at least half the time he’s just on a regular old date (if that’s even what you call it when people are that old), but he probably thinks a date isn’t a good enough excuse for running out on his only kid. It’s true the guy almost never misses a Friday night dinner—that’s his penance, to spend an hour a we
ek face to face with me. But once the torture of eating pizza together is over, we’re both free to spend the rest of the weekend as we please. Sometimes I barely glimpse him again until we get into the Saab Sunday afternoon for the drive back to Darlington.

  Of course, I never tell my mom this; she assumes we spend the whole weekend together. She’d be bullshit if she knew. It’s easy to lie because she never questions me about Dad. It suits my purposes that they know nothing about each other anymore; it gives me some privacy.

  I guess Mom doesn’t really want to know how chummy we two guys are. Once in a while she gets a little curious, but all I have to do is make up a simple story about a movie or a basketball game and she’s satisfied. One time, when I was younger, I told her an elaborate lie for no particular reason, just to see if I could get away with it, I guess, about a party Dad had taken me to and how I’d met all these dancers from the Boston Ballet and some actors from the American Repertory Theater. I even mentioned a few famous painters whose names I remembered from books that had been lying around on Dad’s coffee table for two or three years, books published by his company. Mom got that familiar twitch in her face when I mentioned the names, and her eyes got wet too, maybe because those were the kinds of people she used to meet when she and Dad went out together, or maybe just because now she knew for certain her son was a heartless liar. I’m not sure. But after that I made my lies smaller and less interesting.

  I certainly never mention to her how often Dad has girlfriends over to spend the night. I try not to know too much about that myself. I mean, Dad has outfitted this room for me with a TV, a VCR, a CD player, a computer, and a refrigerator, obviously hoping I’ll never have a reason to leave it. Unfortunately, I still have to go to the bathroom now and then, but I always check the whereabouts of all other guests before making a late night dash.

  Up until a few months ago Brian sometimes came into Boston with me for the weekend. It was easier to have somebody else there when I was younger, when I still felt anger balled up in the back of my throat every time Dad asked me a question. Brian would chatter away about dumb stuff, like why his mother bought kosher hot dogs even though they weren’t Jewish, and Dad and I would just sit there bored silly, but at least we didn’t have to speak to each other. But lately we’ve gotten more comfortable with our own meaningless conversations, or, more often, silence.

  Besides, this year Brian has become a maniac about girls, and it really gets on my nerves. Brian thinks the female population of Boston is much cooler than the girls in Darlington (with the exception of the extraordinary Violet Neville, of course). He can go on about it for hours. We’ll be walking down Newbury Street, which is always full of girls—everything from hippie students to model wannabes—and Brian will be practically panting.

  “Do you think that girl’s pretty? Do you like nose rings? Don’t you think she looks like that girl on Party of Five? Do you think Michelle Pfeiffer is more beautiful than Claudia Schiffer? If you could go out with any model, which one would you pick? Don’t you think red hair makes a girl look hot?”

  I can’t stand it anymore, the constant talk about girls and sex. I just don’t feel like thinking about that stuff. Maybe it’s weird, but I’m not interested in it. I mean, it worries me a little sometimes, because I guess guys my age are supposed to be like Brian, lusting after pouty lips and big boobs. But to me, the mystery of female body parts is one I’d just as soon not solve. Not that I’m interested in boys either—I’m just not interested in the whole idea of locked lips or proclamations of love. I can’t imagine being in love with somebody, letting her touch me and tell me things I wouldn’t know whether to believe.

  I’m starting to think I’ll probably never have a girlfriend, which would be okay too. On those few occasions when a girl has actually flirted with me, tipped her head sideways and laughed at some stupid remark, all it did was make me angry. It seemed like she was playing a game with idiotic rules. First you laugh, then you tell a pretty lie, then you stick your tongue in each other’s mouths, then you say something really mean and hurtful to each other, then you go off to find somebody else who wants to play the game. This is an activity for intelligent people? I think not.

  It’s kind of unfair, but I think I probably could have a girlfriend (if I wanted one) more easily than Brian. Not only does the guy turn into a stuttering sweatbox around females, but he also carries about 120 pounds on six feet of bones. He’s got this incredibly curly brown hair that sticks way out so that altogether he looks like a little kid’s drawing of a tree. Whereas I actually look fairly normal: average height and weight, a pretty low zit count, and straight black hair just long enough to appear slightly unkempt (the I-don’t-give-a-damn look). Freshman year a girl in my algebra class told me I had bedroom eyes. I told her she had bathroom lips and that was the end of that. But I looked in the mirror when I got home to see if I could tell what my eyes really looked like: dark and thick, like no place you’d want to go swimming.

  The woman at the cash register was really giving me an evil look. Twenty after eleven. I leaned against the wall and sank to the floor where I couldn’t see her, picking up a copy of a nearby zine on my descent so I could pretend I was reading it if she walked over to check on me. It was called No Regrets and the cover was bright red with black ink. Dumb title. Everybody had regrets, even if they didn’t want to talk about them. It looked like it might be funny, though. I read some of the poems in the front—they were short and silly. There was one about eating asparagus and how your pee smells weird afterward, which I really enjoyed because I always notice the same thing, but I never heard anybody mention it before.

  A stack of zines hit the floor right next to where I was sitting. I sort of glanced in that direction, then zeroed in. Escape Velocity. That must be her!

  “Sorry,” she said loudly. “Did I bump you?”

  She was speaking to me. “Uh, no.” Not at all what I’d expected. Small, tiny almost, though her voice was big. She wore those fat, black boots girls seemed to like so much, but even wearing those her feet looked about a third the size of mine. She had on black jeans and a black leather jacket, and her hair was black too, about shoulder length with spikey ends that looked like they’d cut into her flesh if she took her protective coat off. I was so sure she’d be big—that was the way I’d been thinking about her—imposing, sort of, even scary.

  I guess I must have laughed or snorted or something. I was just surprised. She spun around and glared at me.

  “What’s your problem?” Her voice was just like her haircut, sharp and dangerous. Big or little, she was kind of scary.

  “No problem,” I said. I put my hands up to show her I wasn’t armed. “Are you Marisol? Who writes Escape Velocity?”

  She slanted her head sideways so she was glaring at me cockeyed. “Yeah, so what if I am?”

  “Nothing. I mean, I came here today to get the new issue. And to meet you.”

  She turned and faced me, hands on her hips. She reminded me of a little bitty Clint Eastwood or something. “How did you know I was coming today?”

  “It says so in the zine. Number two will be available on March second, which is today.” I was beginning to feel stupid looking up at her from the floor, so I slid back up the wall until I was towering over her, even though I’m only five foot ten. She backed up.

  “So, is Marisol your real name, or a nom de plume? You know, a name you use …”

  “I know what a nom de plume is. I’m not an idiot.”

  I didn’t seem to be coming off too well. “So, it’s your name then?”

  “What are you, the FBI? Yeah, it’s my name, all right?” She hiked her black backpack up on one shoulder and turned to go.

  “So …” I didn’t know what else to say. Here was the person who wrote all that great stuff in Escape Velocity and I wasn’t saying the right things to get her to stick around. “Aren’t you going to take copies of any of the other zines?”

  She shrugged. “I have subscription
s to the ones I like. If I read all this stuff, I wouldn’t have time to do my own writing.”

  I gave up on subtlety and held out a copy of Bananafish. “You might like this one.”

  Marisol rolled her eyes and fingered the magazine away from me like she didn’t want to get her hands dirty. She flipped through the first few pages.

  “It’s mine,” I said.

  “No kidding. What a shock.” She kept reading, though.

  “Take it home, why don’t you? It’s free.”

  “Such a deal.” She flipped back to the cover. “So, Giovanni. Is that your nom de plume?”

  She was like a grenade that was about to go off in my hand. How the hell could I tell her my name was John? Nobody was named John anymore—it was a 1950s name. A name for your annoying uncle.

  “My family’s Italian,” I said, skirting the issue. Not a total lie. Galardi is Italian, after all, even though we’re about six generations removed from the hills of Tuscany.

  “Yeah? Well, I’m a Puerto Rican Cuban Yankee lesbian, so that puts me a lot higher on the exotic scale than you, Giovanni Italian.” She gave me a wallop on the arm with my own zine. “So, I’ll take this home and look it over.”

  This time she did turn and leave, quickly, slipping through the revolving doors without even touching them.

  I grabbed a copy of Escape Velocity #2 in the hand that still held No Regrets and raced out the door. She was already half a block down Newbury Street.

  “Wait a minute!” I called out, jogging after her. “How about—do you want to go get an ice cream or something? And talk?”

  Marisol turned around. “Ice cream? It’s freezing out here! What are you, trying to pick me up? I told you I’m a lesbian.”

  “Absolutely not,” I told her, just a little offended. “I’m not interested in that. I mean, it’s better that you’re a lesbian. I don’t really like girls much.” I knew I’d screwed myself the minute it came out. Her arms plowed into her waistline.

  “For your information, dickhead, lesbians are girls. Don’t they teach sex ed in your school system?”