Not Exactly a Love Story

ALSO BY AUDREY COULOUMBIS

Getting Near to Baby
Jake
Lexie
Love Me Tender
Maude March on the Run!
The Misadventures of Maude March
Say Yes
Summer’s End
War Games
(cowritten by Akila Couloumbis)

On my fifteenth birthday, January 16, 1977, I slogged through a
New York City rainstorm of hurricane proportions to buy the Sunday paper.

Actually, several newspapers, including those from Chicago and Houston. I didn’t get the California papers. If I’d been born at the same moment on the West Coast, with the three-hour time difference, I’d have been born yesterday. Plus, the rain had already reduced the California paper to papier-mâché.

I’m a Capricorn, the sign represented by a goat with a fish’s tail. Altogether, five horoscopes told me these things:

My dog died.

I grant you, she was a pretty old dog. Her health had been poor for some time, and it came as no surprise when she just didn’t wake up one morning. It’s what old dogs do, after all. But that didn’t make it any easier to accept.

Dad called the vet so we’d have someplace to take her. Mom went to work, worrying she’d be late, but Dad and I sort of took the day. We sat with my dog curled up between us on the couch, right where she’d died, and remembered all her best stuff.

On the way back home, Dad asked if I wanted another dog. I said no. She’d been my dog for fourteen years, she was irreplaceable.

* * *

A few days later, I bought a Valentine’s Day card for my girl—or at least the girl I’d been very fond of for two years—and slipped it into the vent in her locker. I signed it “Anonymous Admirer.” I had an idea that would be more interesting than getting a signed card.

I’d planned to ask her to the movies or maybe a museum, and I’d say something witty about anonymous admirers so she’d know that card came from me. Mainly, I wanted to stand out a little from the crowd. I’d take her to a school dance for our second date, where I figured I would really shine.

She didn’t show up for math class, and then she didn’t show up in the cafeteria. Somebody told me she’d moved away over the weekend. Without saying a word to me. Not even good-bye.

Of course, it’s true that I never told her that I thought of her as my girl. And she did leave several other admirers behind. I could see that she might not feel obligated.

Only a week later, my parents called me to the dining room table for a family conference. Not an unusual occurrence in itself. I’d been neglecting to take the garbage out. I had a pile of laundry in one corner of my room.

“Your dad and I—we have something sad to tell you. We’ve decided to divorce.”

“Divorce?”

Dad’s eyes looked like deep wounds in a quivering heart. Pleading for its life.

“We’ve grown apart,” Mom said. “We’re still very fond of each other, of course.”

Tears filled Dad’s eyes and shimmered there on the brink of his eyelashes, but he never let them trickle pathetically down his face.

“We know you’re old enough to understand how this could happen,” Mom said.

Dad nodded.

“The divorce will be amicable,” Mom said. “We’ll try to work things out so that your life changes as little as possible. In those interests, your dad will find another place to live as soon as he is able.”

Dad nodded amicably.

Mom mumbled something about work to do and retired to the bedroom. Dad looked at me and I shrugged. A shrug that said I found all of this pretty awful but I was handling it. What good is it to be fifteen with everyone calling you a young man if you can’t handle something?

I woke up the next morning to a case of galloping acne.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Everybody has a few pimples. A few pimples is what I went to bed with. By morning the number of blotches had doubled, and by the time I got home from school I had weeping pustular eruptions. That’s what the dermatologist called them.

“Gold! What’s happened to you?”

I shrugged.

He wore goggles and a surgical mask during the
appointment. If not for the rubber gloves, I’d’ve thought he was going snorkeling.

“Worst case I’ve ever seen,” he said, looking like I might be contagious. He said he’d leave a prescription at the front desk and quickly left the exam room.

Cultural differences. My mother told me this was the reason for
the divorce. That’s not to be read as religious differences. My dad grew up with a Hanukkah bush twinkling in the corner of the living room while the menorah was being lit, and baskets of chocolate from the Passover Bunny. As for Mom, the more candles, the better.