In Stereo Where Available (11 page)

“What they’re selling. What are those things?”

He cleared his throat.
“You
know.”

“No, I don’t. They don’t actually tell you. They just talk about how they’re everybody’s little secret. Apparently I’m not in on this secret.”

“But they
do
tell you,” he insisted.

“Afterglow Disposable Freshening Towelettes,” said the voice.

Jerry nodded toward the TV. “See?”

“See what?” I asked. “What’s the little secret? What are they even
for?”

Pepper ducked her head as Jerry scratched her too hard. He rubbed his hand up and down his face quickly, his eyes squeezed closed. “You really don’t know?”

“No, do you?”

“Afterglow, Phoebe.
Afterglow.”

I looked at him blankly.

“For after two people…
you
know. So you don’t have to use a T-shirt or a towel or whatever, I guess.”

“For what?”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you messing with me?”

“No, I’m not messing with you. I just have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Slouched over with his elbows on his knees, he turned bright pink, pushed his hands back through his hair, and said, “They’re for cleaning up the mess after you make love.”

I laughed. “Is there normally a mess?”

He sat back against the sofa. “You
are
screwing with me.”

“Jerry, I’m
not
. I just didn’t know.”

“How can you not know? It’s not like it’s easy to miss.”

“Well, it is if you’ve never done it before.”

He cut his gaze in my direction, his hands still against his knees. “You haven’t?”

“No. I guess I just assumed everything sort of…stays where it goes.”

“You mean, you’re still a…” He coughed, like he was choking on a bit of saliva.

“Yes
. I’m not necessarily up on all of these things. All I know is what I’ve heard from my sister, and she’s not exactly going to share things like cleanup hints. Anyway, she makes the same assumptions as everybody else, and so half of what she says goes over my head anyway.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t, uh, know.”

“That’s okay. I just don’t want you to think I’m stupid. They didn’t cover that part in health class, that’s all. When I hear ‘afterglow,’ I’m thinking about what they taught us about light in my physics class in college. There must be some sexual meaning I didn’t know about.”

“Not exactly. It’s just referring to the cuddling part afterward.” He touched my knee with his knuckles. “I don’t think you’re stupid. It was stupid of
me
to assume. Sorry.”

“No problem.”

I rested my head against his shoulder, and we watched the rest of
Belle of Georgia
together, his folded-up fingers still touching my knee.

“I’m going crazy,” said Lauren.

I shook a box of Rice-a-Roni into a pan of boiling buttertinted water and turned down the heat. Lauren was leaning against the wall edge by the refrigerator with one fist on her hip, giving me a tight-mouthed, irritated look.

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because of
that.”
She pointed to the six-pack of A&W root beer on the breakfast bar. “I know you don’t drink that stuff.”

“No, that’s Jerry’s. I don’t like root beer.”

“That’s my point. Men aren’t supposed to do things like that. It’s women who do the leave-behind thing. Scrunchies and earrings and things like that. Men don’t.”

“It’s not a leave-behind thing. It’s just practical. He’s been over here two Thursdays in a row, and it makes more sense to leave it here than to bring over a can of it every week.”

“You’re one to talk about
practical
. I’m telling you, you really ought to let me set you up with Brad before you get too fixated on Jerry. Just give him a try, Fee. He really wants to meet you.”

“You
mentioned
me to him?”

“Not exactly. Well, sort of. We can do it like a double date, okay? Me and Prabath and you guys. He’s
so
right for you. He’s an AB-group Taurus. For an A-group Pisces, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

“I thought you said I was an INFP.”

“That’s your Myers-Briggs type. I’m talking about your blood type this time. I bet you don’t even know what blood type Jerry is.”

“No idea. I know he’s a Cancer, though. I thought you said water signs go together.”

“Yeah, but he must have something weird on the cusp. Even a guy who’s a Cancer can’t be
that
pro-commitment unless he’s a little mental. How long did you and Bill go out? Three months?”

“Yeah, three and a half, four. Something like that.”

“And I don’t remember Bill ever leaving anything over here. See, that was nice and normal. A date on Saturday night and then get on with your life for the rest of the week.”

I turned on the heat under a pan of chicken broth and set a chicken breast in it. “That’s because Bill is an extremely ambitious grad student who never does anything but work on programming projects. He also still lives with his mother and couldn’t get together on Friday nights because he was watching old episodes of
Dr. Who
on the Sci-Fi Channel.”

“He
was
a little, uh, geeky.”

“I like geeky guys. Jerry’s geeky, too. He plays Scrabble with a dictionary. He’s on a different level from Bill, though. His geekiness doesn’t interfere with his life.”

“You guys play Scrabble together? See, I need a guy like that. I kick ass at Scrabble. Maybe I need to be more open to guys who are Leos. They’re competitive. Or the intellectual guys in 20912.”

I shrugged. “Or you could try returning wrong-number phone calls.”

Lauren threw her hands up in the air and walked away from me. “I’m just going to have to convince myself that there’s some kind of numerology operating there somewhere.”

Holly, the school speech therapist, nudged me with her elbow as I spooned French onion dip onto my little pink-and-blue paper plate. “I see your sister behaved herself last night,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

I sighed. “Yeah. You never know, though, with Madison. Next week she could shave off the Southern girls’ eyebrows in their sleep or something.”

Holly giggled. “That could be fun. Boy, that Rhett guy sure is cute, isn’t he? He’s got everything but the white horse.”

Antonia came over to the table with a bowl of mini gherkins, setting it down beside the tub of ice cream. “I read he actually went to West Point, just like the real Rhett Butler.”

“The real Rhett Butler got kicked out of West Point,” I reminded her.

“I don’t believe it,” said Holly. “I think he must have gone to Princeton or someplace like that. He’s got that whole blue-blooded, Martha’s Vineyard thing going.”

“You think?” I asked doubtfully.

“I think it’s just his look,” said Antonia. “I’m pretty sure I saw him in a Tommy Hilfiger ad once.”

Holly pointed to the pickles and ice cream beside each other on the table. “Does Claire actually expect us to eat those things together?”

Antonia shrugged. “It’s a baby shower. Who knows? Sarah might have requested it. Phoebe, did your mom ever say anything about having weird cravings when she was pregnant with twins?”

“Only when she’s whining about what an insensitive jerk our father was to her. She said she wanted sweet-and-sour shrimp all the time, but he got sick of Chinese food and said she was spending too much money.”

“Nice. Hey, Sarah, did you hear that?”

The guest of honor followed her belly into the dining room, ducking under the little shower of tissue-paper baby booties her best friend had hung in the doorway. She made a face and pushed down against the top of her stomach with her hand. “Somebody’s got their feet in my lungs,” she said.

“You ought to ask Phoebe for advice,” Antonia told her. “I bet she knows all the secrets of how twins conspire against their parents.”

“She’s having a girl and a boy, though,” I reminded Antonia. “That’s totally different from having identical twin girls. If you ask me, it’ll be a lot easier.”

Sarah dug the scoop into the marble-fudge ice cream, removing about half of it from the container at once. “Why is that?”

“Because there’s nothing worse than having two little girls going through all the same stages at exactly the same times. There’s the dramatic four-year-old stage, and the mouthy six-year-old stage, and the hypercritical eight-year-old stage, and that’s before you even get to middle school. There’s not enough wall space in a house for two girls who are both going through the obsessed-with-boy-bands stage.”

Holly laughed. “Which band were you guys obsessed with?”

“The NYC Boyz,” I told her. “Remember them? There were five of them, and they did really nice harmonies on all these awful songs—”

“I remember them,” said Sarah happily, swallowing a mouthful of ice cream and waving her spoon in the air. “They did ‘Dancin’ after Midnight.’ I had a crush on Clint. He was the hot one.”

“He was the
blond
hot one,” Holly corrected. “I had a thing for the Hispanic hot one. José. I wonder if that was his real name.”

Antonia smiled at me. “So did you and Madison have a crush on the same one?”

“Of course not. She was obsessed with Derek, the ‘bad boy’ one who always wore a motorcycle jacket. I was in love with C. J. Anastasio.”

“The clean-cut one,” Antonia remembered. “That sounds like you.”

We wandered out to the living room, and I sat down on the far side of the sofa with my plate of veggies and dip in my lap. “I can still remember everything about him,” I said wistfully. “His birthday is July 8th. He likes Chicago-style hot dogs and Hawaiian Punch, his favorite subject is math, and he likes girl-next-door types.”

“Is that what sold you?” asked Sarah. “You thought you had a chance with him?”

I ran a piece of broccoli through the dip. “What do you mean,
had
?”

Antonia laughed, putting a hand over her mouth self-consciously. “Awwww,” she said in a little-kid warning voice. “I’m gonna tell your
boyfriend
.”

Holly perked up. “Phoebe has a boyfriend? How did I miss that?”

“He teaches at Kensington,” said Antonia. I elbowed her in the arm, but she just wiped the ranch dip from the side of her thumb and added, “Jerry Sullivan.”

Holly’s face lit up with a rapturous smile. “Jerry Sullivan! No kidding!”

I paused with a red grape halfway to my mouth. “You know him?”

“Sorta kinda. When I was at Lincoln Middle School, I shared an office with the chick he was seeing at the time. Serena. Guidance counselor. Her car was always in the shop so he came to pick her up a lot.”

I swallowed and rearranged my plate on my other knee, feeling my heart beat a little harder. In my mind I could hear Lauren loudly chewing me out over how stupid it was to feel jealous. After all, hadn’t our relationship begun with his effort to pick up somebody else?

“Nice guy,” she continued. “Quiet. Probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise with Serena, anyway. I ran into him at a conference over the summer, as a matter of fact. I said hi, but he didn’t recognize me.”

“A conference?” Suddenly my interest shifted from Serena to Karen the Mystery Girl. “Was there a woman named Karen there?”

Holly shrugged. “I dunno. Could have been. I just did my workshops and went home.”

“But not that you remember?” I persisted.

She shook her head and dug her spoon into her ice cream. “Nope.” Taking a bite, she went on, “I’m not surprised to hear they’re not together anymore. I’m sure she’s moved on to make some other guy miserable.”

I grinned. “Go on, keep telling me how awful she was. It’s good for my self-esteem.”

Holly rolled her eyes and wadded up her napkin in her fist. “Get comfortable,” she said. “We might be talking until Sarah gives birth.”

Saturday was my Aquarium day with Jerry. I was waiting outside my apartment building when he pulled up in his little Volkswagen Jetta with Betsy and Marco crammed into their car seats in the back. He parked the car at the curb and walked around to the passenger side door to open it for me.

“Thank you,” I said, slipping into the seat. He closed the door gently, and I turned around to smile at the kids. “Hi, guys.”