I Think I Love You (2 page)

In every interview I had read, David said that he preferred a girl to just be herself. But to be honest with you, I was unsure of who myself was, or even if I had one, although I still maintained a touching faith that this unknown and as yet undiscovered me would be deeply appealing to David when we eventually met. How could I be sure? The understanding in his eyes told me so. (Oh, those eyes. They were deep green pools you could pour all your longing into.) Still, I reckoned that meeting David would be awkward enough without any unnecessary confusion, so I did my best to pick up American. It would be tricky to go to a bathroom in his house in Los Angeles, for example, and find there was no bath, wouldn’t it? Or imagine saying someone was mad. David would think that I meant they were angry.
Crazy
means mad in America. Back then, I couldn’t imagine David ever being angry, he was so gentle and sensitive. Sorry, do I sound mad?

“Donny Osmond’s a moron,” Sharon said firmly. She was kneeling on the floor, picking at the staples in a centerfold with her thumbnail, trying to free a male torso. The slender, headless body was naked to the waist and practically hairless, except for a fine golden down just above the belt, which boasted a heavy bronze buckle. It looked like the door
knocker to an Aztec temple. Sharon eased the poster off the frail metal pins until it rested on her hands, trembling a little in the hot air blowing from the small heater beside her. Sharon’s bedroom was small, painted a sickly shade of ointment pink and reeked of burned hair, a bad cotton-candy smell that got in your nostrils and stayed there. Sharon had dried her hair in front of the heater and a few strands had gotten sucked into the back, but we didn’t really notice the smell, so absorbed were we in our work.

“I don’t think Donny’s a moron, to be honest with you,” I said carefully.

“All the Osmonds are morons. I read it in a mag,” she insisted, without looking up from the poster. Sharon was an expert restorer. The best artist in our class. When she grew up she could probably get a job in a museum or an art gallery. I loved to watch her work. The way she rolled her tongue into a little tunnel when she was concentrating and applied her attention to the tiny puncture holes in David’s stomach, soothing the torn paper with her fingertips until the flesh appeared to seal up.

“There you go, lovely boy,” she said, and placed a noisy smacking kiss on his belly button before adding the poster to the pile.

There was a prickle in my throat like a piece of trapped wool. I badly wanted to correct Sharon about the Osmonds’ being morons, but our friendship was still too new to risk disagreement. We liked each other because we agreed. We agreed because we both thought David Cassidy was the most wonderful boy currently alive and maybe in all of human history. At thirteen years of age, I couldn’t imagine the luxury of having a friend you could disagree with. If you disagreed with her, you could fall out. Then, before you knew it, you’d be back out there in the playground by yourself, sighing and checking your watch every couple of seconds to indicate that you did have an arrangement to meet someone and were not, in fact, the kind of sad, friendless person who had to pretend they were waiting for friends who did not exist.

Even worse, you could find yourself entering into anxious negotiations with some other borderline outcast to be your partner in PE so you didn’t have to be in a pair with Susan Davies—Susan Smell, who had a disease of the skin no one could spell. Her face, her arms and her
legs were all cratered, like the surface of the moon, only some days the holes were filled in with the chalky dust of calamine lotion. We knew exactly what it was because our mothers dabbed the lotion on us when we got chicken pox. The angry, itchy spots were like tiny volcanoes around which the soothing pink liquid hardened into a tempting lava crust. Mustn’t pick it, mind, or it would leave a scar. The worst thing about Susan Davies, apart from the way you felt really sorry for her but still didn’t do anything to help her, was the stink. Honest to God, Susan smelled so bad it made you retch in the corridor when she went past, even though she always walked on the side with the windows.

“Donny’s a
Mormon
. I think it’s a religion they founded in Utah,” I said cautiously, trying the sounds in my mouth.

Ooh. Ta.

I knew exactly what Mormons were. Donny Studies were part of my deep background research on David. I knew everything about the other Osmonds, too, just in case, even Wayne. At a pinch, I could have given you the star sign of every member of the Jackson 5, and details of their difficult upbringing, which was in such contrast to their carefree, joyful music. Twiddly diddly dee, twiddly diddly dee. Twiddly diddly dee. Dee dee!

You know, I can never hear the opening chorus of “Rockin’ Robin” without a spasm of regret for what became of that remarkable little boy and all his sweetness.

Even as a child, I had this overdeveloped taste for tragic biographical information, a sort of twitching inner radar for distress. I may have been the only one not to be in the least bit surprised when Michael Jackson began to take leave of his adorable black face in painful cosmetic stages. You see, I understood all about hating the way you looked and wanting to magic away the child who made a parent feel angry or disappointed. When you grow up, they call this empathy. When you’re thirteen, it just makes you feel like you’re not so horribly alone.

“D’you reckon Mormons all have to wear purple because it’s Donny’s favorite color?” I asked.

Sharon giggled. “Get away with you, Petra, you’re a case, you are!”

We thought we were hysterically funny. We laughed at anything, but lately boys had become a particular target for our witticisms. We laughed at them before they could laugh at us, or ignore us, which curiously
felt even more wounding than being teased or insulted. You know, I always liked Sharon’s laugh better than mine. My laugh sounded like a nervous cough that only starts to let itself go too late, when the joke has passed. Sharon made that happy, hiccupy sound you hear when you pull a cord in a doll’s back. She looked a bit like a doll, did my new maybe friend. She was round and dimpled and her eyes were an astonishing bluebell blue beneath the palest barely there lashes. Her hair was that bone-dry flaxen kind that bursts out of a person’s head like a dandelion clock. When we sat next to each other in Chemistry, her hair would float sideways on an invisible current of hot air from the Bunsen burner and stick to my jumper. If I tried to sweep it off, the static gave me a shock that made my arm swarm.

Sharon was pretty in a way everyone in our group could agree was pretty without feeling bad about it. It was a mystery. Her weight seemed to act as a sort of protective jacket against jealousy. When she lost her puppy fat I think we all sensed it might be a different story. In the meantime, Sharon posed no threat to Gillian, who had gotten the two of us together in the first place and who was the star of our group. No, that’s not right. Gillian was our sun. We all revolved around her and you would do anything, anything at all, really humiliating and shameful things, just in the hope she might shine on you for a few minutes because the warmth of Gillian’s attention made you instantly prettier and more fascinating.

As for me, the jury was still out on my looks. I was so skinny that next to Sharon I looked like a Victorian matchgirl. And don’t go thinking, “Oh, get her, she’s proud of her figure.” Skinny is not the same as slim, no way. Skinny is the last-girl-but-one-to-get-a-training-bra because you’ve got nothing up top. God, I hate that expression.
Up top
. “Hasn’t got much up top, has she?”

Where we lived, girls had Up Top and Down There. You don’t want to let a boy go Down There, but sometimes he was allowed Up Top, if you’d got anything there, like.

Skinny is always being late for hockey and being made to run five times round the games field because you keep your blouse on until the others have left the changing room so they don’t see your sad little girl’s vest. A vest with a single shaming rosebud on the front.

The magazines told us to identify our good points. Mine was eyes.
Large and gray-blue, but sometimes green-blue flecked with amber, like a rock pool when the sun is shining on it. But my eyes also had these liver-colored smudges under them that no cucumber slices or beauty sleep could ever cure. I never stopped trying though.

“Petra’s dark circles are so bad she could go to a masked ball and she wouldn’t need a mask,” Gillian said, and everyone laughed, even me. Especially me. Be careful not to show her what really hurts or she’ll know exactly where to put the knife in next time.

My worst feature was everything else, really. I hated my knees, my nose and my ears—basically anything that stuck out. And I had pale skin that seemed even paler because of my dark hair. On a good day, I looked like Snow White in her glass coffin.

Expertly, my mother took my face in one hand, chin pinched between thumb and forefinger and tilted it sharply toward the bathroom light. She squeezed so tight my jaw ached. “You are not unattractive, Petra,” my mother said coolly. “Bones really quite good. If you pluck the brows when you are older, here and here, like szo, revealing the eyes more. You know, you are really not szo bad.”

“It’s
too
bad, Mum, not so bad. I don’t look
too
bad.”

“That is exactly what I am saying to you, Petra. Relax, please. You are not szo bad for a girl at her age.”

My mother believed she spoke perfect English and my dad always said now was not the time to tell her she didn’t. Did I mention my mother was beautiful? She had a perfect heart-shaped face and eyes that were wide open yet sleepy at the same time. I’d never seen anyone who looked like my mother until one Saturday night I was round Sharon’s house and there was a show on TV. This woman was sitting on a high stool in a dress made of something that shone like foil with a white fur cape draped around the shoulders. She looked glamorous and hard, but her voice was like a soft purr.

“That’s all woman, that is,” Sharon’s dad said, which made me wonder what the rest of women were. Were they halves or quarters? Marlene Dietrich didn’t look like she had kids, but then neither did my mum. Put my blond mother in a gathering of my father’s dark, stocky
Welsh relatives and she looked like a palomino among a herd of pit ponies. Guess which side of the family I took after?

“Got it! Knew it was here somewhere.” Sharon was grinning in triumph. She had found the legs to match the torso.
Jackie
was giving away a free life-size David poster, but it came in parts over three weeks. Last week was jeans and cowboy boots, this time it was the body. They always saved the head till last.

“So you got to keep buying the mag, isn’t it? Do they think we’re blimmin’ stupid or something?”

I couldn’t see Sharon’s face, but I knew she was frowning and funneling her tongue as she lined up David’s belly with his jeans. This was the hard part. Once she’d gotten them in position she flipped the shiny pages over and I handed her the strip of Sellotape, ever the dutiful nurse to her surgeon. We both stood up to get a better view of our handiwork. It wasn’t a typical David pose. Among the thirty or so posters on Sha’s walls there wasn’t another quite like it. His thumbs were tucked into his waistband, the top button of his fly was undone and the jeans wrenched apart so you glimpsed that inverted V of hair that the zipper normally hid. I tried to think of something funny to say, but my mouth felt dry and oatmealy. The absence of his head was definitely a problem. We urgently needed David’s smiling face to reassure us about what was going on down below. I felt a flicker as a tiny pilot light ignited in my insides and a warmth like liquid spread across my stomach and trickled down into my thighs.

Sharon had seen a penis, but it was her brother’s so it didn’t count. Carol was the only girl in our group who had touched a real one—Chris Morgan’s, in the tree house down the Rec where the boys went to look at dirty mags. Carol said the penis felt like eyelid skin. Could that be right? For weeks after she told us, I would brush a finger over the skin above my eye and I would marvel that something that was made of boy could be so silky and fine, like tissue paper.

When we went through the mags, Sharon and I always flicked past the bad boys. Mick Jagger and that David Bowie, he was a strange one. We sensed instinctively that those stars were not for us. They might
want to come down off the posters on the wall and do something. Exactly what they would do we didn’t know, but our mothers would not have it.

“It’s really weird,” Sharon said, contemplating the headless, semi-naked David.

“Weird,” I agreed.

It was our new favorite word, and we used it as often as we could, but it really bothered me that we weren’t saying it right. When David said it on
The Partridge Family
, it had one syllable. Whirred. Our accent put the stress in the wrong place somehow. However hard I tried, it still came out as “whee yad.” On the cello, I could play any note I liked. I knew if it was wrong the same way I knew if I was cold or hungry, but controlling the sound that came from my own mouth was different. Funny thing is I didn’t even realize I had a Welsh accent. Not until our year went on a school trip to Bristol Zoo and some English girls in the motorway services mimicked the way I asked for food.

“Veg-e-tab-ils.”

I pronounced the
e
in the middle, but English people didn’t.

They said “vedge-tibuls.”

Why did they bother putting an
e
in there, then, if you weren’t supposed to say it? So people like me could sound
twp
and they could have a laugh.

Sharon and me were doing our top rainy-Sunday-afternoon thing to do, listening to David’s
Cherish
album and flicking through magazines for any mention of him. After Sunday school, which lasted for two long hours, there wasn’t much else to do in our town on the Sabbath, to be honest with you. Everyone abided by some unwritten law that people should stay indoors and keep quiet. Even if you didn’t go to chapel, which we always did because my father was the organist, it felt as though chapel had come to you. My Auntie Mair never used scissors on a Sunday, because God could see everything, even the wax in your ears and the dirt under your nails. You could grow potatoes under there.
Achafi!
Disgusting. And you didn’t hang your washing out on the line because of what the neighbors would think. The judgment of the neighbors might not be as bad as that of the Lord Thy God, Dad said, but you knew about it sooner.