Love Sick (4 page)

In second grade, my father gave me a big picture book called
Daddy Is a Doctor
for Christmas. I already loved to read but he! taught! me! to! read! exclamation! points! I’d never gotten a Christmas gift from my father before. I was so proud of the book and my new talent! for! reading! out! loud! that I took the book with me to school. Sister Mary Adeline read the book to the class and then went on to remark that “Daddies don’t have to be doctors to be wonderful.”

I was crushed. Sure, I was proud of Daddy being a doctor, but it was the fact that the book was a gift, and one he spent time enjoying with me, that made it as precious as the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments and the Magna Carta all rolled up into one. Sister’s indifference was an insult to my badge of love.

Will remembers the day perfectly because he decided, after Sister read the book to the class and I ended up bawling in the hallway, that he’d show me a thing or two. Maybe his daddy worked at the paper mill, but Will swore that he would become a doctor. (In fact, he became a doctor
and
a doctorate.)

But that noon, he came over to the swings where I was waiting in line and said, “You think your dad’s so great, don’t you?”

“I—I—” I stuttered, wanting to explain, wanting not to cry anymore.

“I just want you to know that he went hunting with my dad.” He spun on his heel and stalked away.

I brooded over his reaction the rest of the afternoon and into the evening when my father came home.

“I like Will’s father,” Dad said when I told him what Will said. “He’s a good guy.”

“I think Will was saying his daddy is as good as yours,” my mother said.

Their answers weren’t satisfying. That was what Sr. M. Adeline had already said. Will was saying something else, something more. Something about who and what our fathers were and what they did together. Something about their being friends. I was confused and made unhappy by my confusion. What was he trying to tell me?

Will’s notice of what my father did for a living, I learn forty-five years later, turned to fantasies of adoption when my mother brought me to a birthday party. “She was elegant and kind of . . . rich, you know?” he says when I ask him about his memories of my parents.

She had beautiful legs and wore her hair in a low bun. Mother rarely got angry; the rest of the time she was smiling, her eyes brown and warm, her lipstick always fresh. I can imagine her walking me up to the front door of Mary Rose or Mary Jane or Mary Susan’s house to say hello to her mother, and I can imagine how the other kids would take notice of this stylish woman and her tall, chubby, rat-haired daughter who talked and laughed too loud and walked in a second-grade-fashionable shuffle.

“She was elegant,” I agree. “I never thought of her as personifying rich. She was just my mother.”

“She knew everyone’s name. She arched her feet. Don’t you remember how she arched her feet?” he asks, and I do: watching her accelerate when driving, her foot curving out of her high heels as she pressed down on the pedal.

Our third grade memories are of the terrible experience of learning cursive writing under the tutelage of Sister Mary Francesca, aka Franny-Franny-Machine-Gun-Granny. All those hilarious stories of mean nuns you’ve ever heard? She was the Stalin of mean nuns.

At St. Anthony’s, cursive writing was not learned in pencil. It was learned in ink—in fountain pen. There were two kinds of fountain pens: one with cartridges and one that siphoned ink out of a bottle.

I had to have the latter. It was so much easier to tattoo Will’s neck with that dripping nib.
*
He tells me I was fond of drawing fishes on him, which infuriated his mother to new heights of scolding and scrubbing. “You let that girl do anything to you!” he tells me she screamed. “Stand up for yourself!!”

Knowing Will, he remained silent as she scrubbed harder, the ink already removed. His silence would prod her to yell more as she began to scrub away skin.

“I don’t care if she’s bigger than you and a girl,” I hear her saying as tears began rolling down his face from his burning neck. “Make her stop.”

And I can hear him finally busting out: “I don’t want to. I
like
her! I wish I were a Kuffel!”

“I can’t believe you were dumb enough to tell your mother that,” I tell him. I am sitting on a low railing in a Brooklyn Heights twilight, on my way to walk a dog. He’s at home for once, taking a rare night off from the veterinary lab. His workaholism can’t be a surprise to anyone reading this.

“I can’t either. You know what she was like.”

And I do. While I didn’t know his raw neck was my fault, I was there the day after she gave him a haircut and got so carried away she stabbed him repeatedly with the scissors. “You came to school the next day with cuts along your scalp. I asked you what happened and you said you fell down. I may only have been eight years old but I knew you were lying. Why did she hate you so much?”

“I dunno. She was really smart but really poor and from a tiny town on the Montana Hi-Line. I think she wanted to go to college, maybe. She certainly didn’t want to have six kids and depend on venison and wild asparagus to feed them. And I was different from the rest, I suppose. I never felt like part of the family.

“But that really did happen, that thing with the scissors?” he asks. “You know, I have this weird thing. I don’t hold grudges. You tell me a story like that and I think, ‘Bless her heart.’”

“Not me,” I say stridently. “And not my mother. She was crushed every time your mom threw you out of the house and you went to stay with one of your father’s coworkers. She wanted you at our house.”

“I wanted to be there too but my mom hated your mother so much, I was afraid she’d torch your house.”

“She should have just hated me. I was the reason you had ink stains on your shirt.”

“You got to start using a fountain pen first and you never let me live it down,” he complains. “And remember how you used to stab me in the ear?”

“Well, excuse
me
, but my daddy
was
a doctor. I was doing you a
favor
. I didn’t just stab you, I licked my red pencil and
then
I stabbed you. You coulda gotten days outta school with ear canals that red. There was method to my madness.”

Another afternoon it occurs to me that the nuns might have broken us up from fourth through seventh grades on purpose.

“It didn’t work,” Will texts back. We were still in the same reading and math classes and somewhere in the middle grades we took to staring at each other. Will has a wide, mobile mouth, basset hound eyes the color of tallow topaz, and eyebrows that had the same coach as Nadia Comaneci. We spoke by raising one eyebrow or the other, flaring our nostrils, wiggling one ear at a time, suppressing the snorts of laughter that would have gotten us detention. Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett had nothing on what we practiced while diagramming sentences.

This mutual fascination with facial tics coincided with class-wide hysteria over Helen Keller. We studied the back of the Scholastic paperback, learning the alphabet for the deaf and blind. Soon Will’s long nimble fingers were flashing swear words at me whenever a teacher wasn’t looking. I insulted him back and at noon he corrected my spelling.

“There’s no such thing as hock spit, Francie. It h-a-w-k. I smell like hawk spit.”

“No, you don’t. You smell like hawk
pee
.”

“Yeah?” His eyebrows shot up in a nearly perfect V and his hand danced in the air.

“That’s stupid,” I said. “You’ve never even smelled vulture shit.”

At the word “shit,” Lorrie McCarthy and Janet Silva stopped in their perambulation around the playground. Every day one was Micky Dolenz and the other was Davy Jones. I never understood the game because they claimed a name and then walked around talking about ordinary things like slumber parties or making gifts from macaroni.

“You could get in trouble for saying That Word,” one of them advised me.

“Which word?” Will asked. “Shit or pee? I didn’t
say
either of those words.” His hand shot out again in a flurry. “Francie said them.”

Lorrie and Janet were good girls. They remembered to turn in their collection envelopes on Sunday and played healthfully outside after doing their homework and before setting the dinner table. When the monsignor asked the congregation to stand, raise their right hands and repeat the Legion of Decency pledge, their fathers didn’t look at them sideways so as to let them know they thought the words were hooey.

More often than not, Will was either practicing the piano or had been sent to his room between coming home from school and dinner, and I was much too involved in reenacting
The Sound of Music
or reading
Jane Eyre
and eating the four cartons of Girl Scout cookies I was supposed to sell.

Put us together and Will and I trapped misbehavior like a Swiffer clings to dust, although Will never got in trouble in school. I always did, usually after following his lead. I blamed it on being such a big target, but I don’t think my helpless idiot sniggering helped either. No one ever said it was bad to steep our upper lips in chocolate milk for the sake of pronounced mustaches. When he convinced me to prick my finger to look at my blood under a microscope it was in the interest of science.

We took organ lessons from Sister Mary Fina. This was essential because we practiced at noon and so got out of mandatory intramural sports. Somewhere in sixth grade, Sr. M. Fina stopped giving Will piano lessons and convinced his parents to take him to a professor at the university. I can’t imagine what she said to get them to agree, but it was important because it made everyone realize Will was brilliant. “Play
Liebestraum
,” my father requested in his best Bette Davis slur; we wouldn’t understand the joke for years, but Will played it, from memory, and then played a run into Chopin. My father’s face softened and went still, jokes gone, the afternoon gone, closing his eyes in pure pleasure. I took piano lessons, too, but “The Spinning Song” did not have that effect on him.

Was he more of a Kuffel than me? My sister-in-law could talk to him forever; my dog Lavender would fling herself on her back for his belly rub; my mother gave and got the hugs her moody adolescent daughter thought were dumb. “What a special boy,” she would sigh when he left. Did Will’s talent and witty politeness with my mother produce the thing that I wanted to make me special, the poems and stories I wrote, with titles like “Chaos” and “Infamy,” that ran the gamut of baffled to depressed to tragic, the direct descendents of our advanced reading class’s library of downers like
Flowers for Algernon
,
Of Mice and Men
,
David and Lisa
?

In 1970, in Missoula, Montana, the public school kids were practicing their French kissing while the dwindling numbers of St. Anthony seventh graders were walking in alphabetical order with precisely two floor tiles between each person, girls in one line, boys in another. Under the church portico, Maryanne Harper whispered to a bunch of us about these weird men she heard about who had been married to unsuspecting men for years. We assumed this homo-business was a crime perpetrated by bad women on the kind of unsuspecting women we, at the age of twelve, were. There were a few couples in our class but it was rhetorical: no one went on dates, St. Anthony’s didn’t have dances, our first girl-boy parties happened with eighth grade graduation. As seventh graders we no longer had to wear the bib of our uniform, we’d stopped playing Barbies and some of us, I learned later, had started having periods, but we were relatively free of all that romantic stuff.

Relatively.

One Friday morning, Will Ames walked up to Mr. Fitzgerald’s chalkboard to work on an equation to determine the volume of a golf ball. I know that it was a Friday and I know that it was a second Friday in the month, the day we were allowed to dress out of uniform. So instead of wearing his daily black trousers, white shirt and forest green sweater, Will was wearing white bellbottoms and a red shirt with collar points nearly to his elbows. I drummed my fingers on my notebook and thought, “Ames has a great butt. Ames is great. I’m . . .

“. . . in . . . love . . . with Will Ames.”

I could never let anyone know this secret. I weighed somewhere between 190 and 240
*
pounds and had thick blocky hair. Sister Mary Theodore had recently taken me aside to tell me I needed to wear a slip and deodorant. My brother Dick, who would these days probably be diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder, enjoyed nothing more than jeering “Fatty” and “Faggy” at me, and I had no reason to disagree. I thought “faggot” meant being bad at sports.

In love and in despair, I walked around in a cloud of confusion. Will and I weren’t a couple, but we hung out more than the few announced couples, who might only sit together on the bus or talk on the phone. I’d watched my brothers date, go to the prom and marry too young, but all of that was beyond my life of babysitting for fifty cents an hour and getting around on a one-speed Schwinn. On the day before that second Friday, Will made me laugh from my belly. By the time we were in the choir loft at noon, I was laughing from my heart and my throat, breathlessly, as he played and sang his perverse, rolling-R lyrics to the tune of “Those Were the Days”:

We dined on garbage,

On rot-ton garbage

We’d sing and dine forever and a day . . .

My giggles pleased him. That was the first thing I figured out.

Mocking love was the second thing I figured out. The nuns put us in the same eighth grade class where twenty-four times a million raging hormones harassed a young teacher, Mrs. Donaldson. Will and I were caught passing notes under our desktops and she moved us across the room from each other. Our old staring game turned into a rubber-lipped imitation of some characters we had seen Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman perform, in which we twitched and quivered eyebrows and noses in imitation of extreme horniness, pulling our lips between our teeth. Our performance of desire was like watching a five-year-old dance
Giselle
: it may have been technically proficient but there was no sexual fire behind it.