Hard Love (10 page)

Jeez, this wedding thing was a big deal to her. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. She was trying to get in shape to be married, like it was the
big game
or something.

She was out of breath, but there was a little smile on her face as she rocked her hips back and forth to that song about the dancing queen. I looked past her, out the window, though I couldn’t have told you what the hell was out there. It was too creepy to watch my mother acting like Jane Fonda in her sweaty little outfit.

“Your dad and I used to love this song. Doesn’t that seem funny now? He’s so sophisticated.”

You could have knocked me over. Mom
never
talks about Dad, and certainly not like that, happy and remembering something nice about him. I had to get out of there—it was too confusing—so I headed for the kitchen. “I guess so,” I called back. “By the way, I’m not going to Dad’s this weekend.”

I hadn’t reached the fridge before she was on my tail, a little close for comfort, I would have thought.

“You aren’t? How come? You go every weekend.”

“I know, but Brian’s play is this weekend. I told him I’d go.”

“Both nights?”

“Well, no, but it seems silly to go into town for just one night. I mean, do I
have
to go every weekend? Believe me, Dad won’t care.” Whoops. That was a clue I didn’t exactly want to give her, that Dad and I weren’t on the best of terms.

But she didn’t pick up on it; there was something else bothering her. “Well, no, you don’t
have
to go. I just
assumed
you’d be gone, but …” She bit her lip.

I still didn’t get it. “You don’t want me around?” I said, laughing. “You planning something illicit?”

The look on her face: like I’d caught her with a needle in her arm or something. Then I got it. Of course. Al must come over on weekends. They sleep together here so his old mother doesn’t get upset over there at the Haunted House. They can be alone here, but not if I stick around.

When she saw I was figuring it out, she rallied. “Of course there’s no problem with you staying here for the weekend. It’s your
home
, John.”

“Actually, it’s your home. Look, I don’t care if Al stays here. You’re going to be married to the guy pretty soon anyway. What difference does it make?” I thought I was being damn
mature
about the whole thing, especially since running into Al in the hallway in nothing but his Calvins was the grotesque image I was having to dislodge from my brain.

Mom turned around and got busy taking canisters out
of the cabinet. “Hand me the margarine, would you, John? I’ll make some corn bread for supper. Wouldn’t that be good? I haven’t made corn bread for ages. I’ll thaw out that chili I put in the freezer …”

Her sex life was obviously not going to be on the table for discussion. She’d slammed the window back down on communication. I should have appreciated the few minutes she let me peek in. She rattled on about food, grabbed the margarine tub with two finger pads so as to have no contact with her son’s beefy hand.

I just stood there for a minute, hoping the heat of my sudden rage would scorch her too. What if I put these repugnant hands on her shoulders, or my arm around her waist, as old Al was certainly allowed to do? Probably every weekend for months now. Brian could kid around with his mother like that. She enjoyed it. But I couldn’t because … because I was
his
son, contaminated.

“Why don’t you go get your homework done before dinner?” she suggested.
Get out of here
was what she meant. I was happy to oblige. The sandpaper sound of her thighs brushing together in those oil slick shorts was making me sick.

As I picked up my pack where I’d dropped it in the den doorway, I heard ABBA belting out some song about how you couldn’t escape even if you wanted to. Hah! That’s what
they
think.

*   *   *

It occurs to me that in my first three issues I didn’t explain the name of my zine. A couple of people have written to say that it’s impossible to have “no regrets,” so it’s kind of a silly name. They tell me everybody has regrets unless they’re some kind of Goody Two-Shoes. Unless their lives have been boringly trouble free. Unless they’re just plain stupid.

First of all, I’m not stupid. I don’t intend to publish my report cards here or some accolade from a teacher, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Whether I’m a Goody Two-Shoes or not, I can’t say. For one thing, I don’t really know what that is—somebody who’s constantly happy or tirelessly helpful to everybody? If so, that’s not me. I get tired and depressed just like everybody else. But if it means somebody who’d rather focus on the good stuff than wail about the bad, then I’ll have to accept the silly name.

As for having a trouble-free life, I haven’t. I hate even telling people this because they’re always so horrified by it, and don’t know what to say to me, but in a zine I guess it’s okay because
you don’t have to say anything back to me unless you want to. My mother died when I was ten years old. That was the biggest, worst thing. There was other stuff too—my dad kind of freaked out on booze for a while, and my older sister got crazy and wild. But those things straightened out, and we’re all okay now. The only thing that can never change is death—that you just have to live with.

If you still have both your parents, you can’t imagine how much it hurts when one of them dies, or how frightened you feel. I was so young I didn’t really understand death (I guess I still don’t), and I kept thinking my mother would come back somehow, even though I knew she couldn’t. Maybe death is too big a thing for anybody to really get a handle on, but when you’re ten and the person who dies is your mother who you love so much, it’s like being in the middle of a tornado that just won’t stop ripping you apart. Except that finally it does. Finally the wind dies down and you’re still standing.

So you’re probably saying, doesn’t she regret that her mother died? Wouldn’t she like to have
her back? Of course I would, but my regrets won’t accomplish that, will they? I don’t regret my time in the tornado either, because it made me who I am today: someone who knows she can weather anything. So when I say “no regrets” I mean there’s no reason to look back, wishing you could change things. I do look back with sadness sometimes, but just as often I remember the happy times I had with my mother. And I always look to the future with hope. If you have no regrets, you stop wishing you could rearrange your past, and you start looking forward to whatever is up ahead.

–Diana Tree

That was the first page of the new issue of
No Regrets
I’d picked up over the weekend. Not the kind of run-together, first-thing-that-comes-to-my-mind stuff that she usually wrote, but, even more than her other writing, it gave me the feeling I really
knew
this Diana person. Like she was telling me all this stuff in a conversation with me alone, not in a zine read by a hundred other people. Not that I really believed what she was saying. But I believed
she
believed what she was saying.

Without giving it much thought, I sat down at the computer and went into my word-processing program. I wrote:

Dear Diana,

Why is it that people don’t know what to say when something bad has happened to someone they know? Maybe because they think there are some magic words that will make everything all right again, only they don’t know what the words are. They ought to understand that there isn’t anything right to say. Mostly they need to just sit there and listen.

When my father walked out on my mother, her best friend didn’t want to talk about it. I remember she kept saying (I was always in the next room, listening to everything the adults said, trying to figure it all out), “Let’s not dwell on it, Anne. Don’t get down in the dumps.” Those weren’t the
magic words. My mother started hanging around with another woman she knew who’d listen to her sad story over and over, about how she never saw it coming, how she didn’t know if she’d survive. (I guess she was in a kind of tornado too.)

She did survive, but I think she’d say she has some regrets, even now, when she’s planning to get married again. I have some regrets too. Can’t help it. I wish she’d married someone else to begin with. Of course, I’d be a different person, but how bad could that be? Without the part of me contributed by my father, maybe I’d be less of a jerk. I’m pretty sure being a jerk is genetic, so it’s probably lucky I don’t have any siblings.

I don’t think you’re stupid or a Goody Two-Shoes. I do think it’s kind of amazing that you’re so optimistic about life, considering what you’ve gone through. From the outside my life probably looks like it’s been a lot easier than yours, but it still seems to me that it basically sucks. Why do you think you didn’t let the whole thing get you down? I’d really like to know. I guess you can tell: I’m looking for magic words too.

I like
No Regrets
a lot. Another good zine is
Escape Velocity
—have you ever seen it? My friend Marisol Guzman writes it. I’m enclosing a copy of my zine,
Bananafish
, in case you’re interested.

I spent a long time trying to decide how to sign the thing (or whether to mail it at all), and then finally I just signed it: John Galardi, a.k.a. Giovanni. I had to stop all this lying about dumb stuff like my name. I mean, there might be a good reason to lie about something important from time to time, but not about stuff like that. And besides, I already told her who I was in the letter. Having an ethnic name wasn’t going to change whatever opinion she already had. Besides, I’d never meet her anyway.

Chapter Eight

I went to hear the nuns sing both nights. What else was there to do? Since my room in Darlington wasn’t as well equipped as the one on Marlborough Street, I had to leave it periodically, which meant the possibility of running into Al, which was fairly uncomfortable even if he wasn’t in his underwear. Rather than feel like a prisoner in my own home, I escaped.

The play was corny as hell, of course, but I kind of enjoyed it anyway. What a riot to see Brian up there, bowing and yes-sirring so seriously. Vincent Brazwell’s voice was pretty grating, but Violet was passable, and those damn nuns were actually good. That last song, every time I heard it, I had to look away and think about something else. For some reason, even though I
knew
these were a bunch of high school kids whose idea of courage was taking advanced placement physics, I couldn’t stop thinking about the real people who had to leave everything behind them and hike out of their country at night with only the
few things they could carry. I don’t know what’s the matter with me lately. It’s like that sad/hopeful stuff gets to me a little bit.

So there I was Friday night, feeling kindly toward the butler and the nun as we sat in a booth at the coffee shop at midnight. Of course, Emily started talking about the prom again and how she could help me get a date. I guess what happened was I felt like such a loser sitting there across from Romeo and Juliet. If you want the truth, I suppose I always felt a little bit superior to old Brian. Like I could have gotten dates if I’d wanted to, but he, who was dying to go out with a girl, couldn’t even get a female to speak to him. Well, Emily was speaking to him, and apparently a whole lot more.

So one minute I’m sitting there trying to figure out how to get out of this prom thing altogether, and the next I hear a fully developed story coming out of my mouth I didn’t even know I was cooking up. Apparently I’ve now become a completely incorrigible liar.

“Actually, I do have a girlfriend,” I said. “In Boston. I’ve been seeing her on weekends when I stay at Dad’s. That’s why I haven’t wanted you to come in with me lately, Bri.” Didn’t that sound absolutely plausible?

“You do?” Brian’s eyes were round as Ping-Pong balls. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Easy. “Well, I didn’t want to make you feel bad. I mean, this started before you met Emily, so …” What a friend.

“I’ve been going with Emily for weeks already. You
could have told me. How’d you meet her?” Brian looked kind of hurt, but Emily was only curious.

“What’s her name? What’s she like? Is she coming to the prom?”

All of sudden I panicked. Where was this lie headed? “Her name is … Marisol. I met her at Tower Records; she’s a zine writer, like me.” No lies there.

“A what writer?” Emily wrinkled up her face.

“Zines. They’re like homemade magazines,” Brian explained. “Only you just put your own writing in it.” I had given Brian a copy of my first issue, so now he was a font of knowledge, even though he probably hadn’t even read the thing.

“Wow. You both do that? How cool!” Emily was impressed by
anything
. She dumped a fourth packet of sugar into her cappuccino, which made me a little more sympathetic toward her than I had been.

“Anyway, that’s how I met her, and now we go out almost every weekend. Not this weekend, since I stayed here for the play.”

“I bet she’s mad,” Emily said.

I shrugged. “We don’t
own
each other.” Apparently Emily couldn’t see my nose expanding like zucchini in August, but I suspected Marisol would take it in at a glance.

“So, you asked her to the prom, then?” Brian looked suspicious.

Some fast talking would be needed now. “Well, that’s the thing. I mean, Marisol is very cool, you know? She’s a city person. We like to just hang out in Boston, take in the
scene. She’s not really the prom type, if you know what I mean.”

“Thanks a lot, John!” Emily let her mouth hang open in mock shock. “I guess we’re just not cool enough for Marisol. We’re
prom types
.”

“That’s not what I meant …”

“I am so sick of this Mr. Cool attitude, you know that?” Brian said, shoving his empty cup across the table. “For years I’ve had to listen to you dis everything and everybody because you think you’re better than they are. Well, you’re no better than the rest of us slobs, John. You’re not!”