Someone Else's Love Story (2 page)

I swear I could
hear
the narrow nostrils of Bethany’s long, elegant nose flaring in distaste through the phone as she said that last bit. It was a carefully worded piece of code. Last year, I’d almost killed my Jewish father by sending Natty to preschool at Mimmy’s Baptist church. Natty and I no longer attended synagogue
or
church, which was better than when I was a kid and had to go to both. Dad offered to pay all tuition if I moved Natty to a “better” school.

“Surely there is more than one close preschool,” he’d said.

“Of course,” I’d told him. “If you prefer, Natty can go to the one run by the Methodists.”

Now Bethany went on, “It means moving to Atlanta. I know that your mother isn’t likely to see this as an opportunity. Country people can be shortsighted, especially when it comes to education. But the benefits . . . I think any decent parent could see them.” She sniffed a little huff of disparaging air and finally came to the heart of it. “You and Natty could stay at the condo. We’d put your own phone line in, and you could decorate the third-floor bedrooms as you please. I’m not sure your father is prepared to suffer the on-call rooms with the residents, so sometimes you’d have him napping in the master. But otherwise, you could think of it as your own place.” There was a pause, and she added, pointedly, “For the year.” Then, in case I hadn’t gotten it, “Until you graduate, I mean.”

This was an amazing number of long-standing, guaranteed fight starters to pack into a single speech. Even a dig at Lumpkin County! Sure, we were rural, but not the kind of rural in
Deliverance
, and she damn well knew it. If she’d hoped to goad me into turning down the condo I’d been coveting—fat chance. I summoned all my inner sugar and said, hell, oh hell, oh hell-hell yes, and then I got off the phone fast as I could.

Now I dumped my heavy duffel by the front door, next to Natty’s
Blue’s Clues
suitcase and the stacked laundry baskets full of books and socks and toys. I went to Mimmy and looped my arms around her little waist and put my face in her hair. She smelled like vanilla.

“You’re the best Mimmy in all the world. I don’t know how I would have gotten through Natty’s baby years without you. I couldn’t have, not and gone to college. But I’m twenty-one. Natty and I have to stand on our own at some point. This is a nice step.”

She shook her head. “You and Natty setting up house ought to be exciting. It’s a rite of passage. I ought to sew you curtains and throw a housewarming. But I don’t know how to celebrate you moving into that awful man’s place.”

I let the
awful man
part go and only said, “I am not moving to the
house
house.”

Bethany and Dad and my three little stepbrothers lived in a huge stucco and stone McMansion out in Sandy Springs. No way I could ever share a roof with Bethany. I called her my Step-Refrigerator to my mother and much worse things to my best friend, Walcott. She’d earned all her names, though to be fair, I’m pretty sure I’d earned whatever she privately called me.

Mimmy started to speak again, but just then we heard Walcott coming down, his long feet slapping the stairs. He had most of my hanging clothes in a fat fold he held against his chest.

“Why do you have so many dresses?” he asked.

“Because I’m a girl,” I said.

My mother eyed my things and said, “A better question is, why do you dress like a forty-year-old French divorcée?”

“I like vintage,” I said, going to unburden Walcott. It was a huge stack; I found most of my clothes at rummage sales and thrift shops, digging through mounds of acid-washed mom jeans for the one good circle skirt or perfect two-dollar wrap dress.

He waved me off with one hand, arms still clutched tight around my clothes, heading for the front door.

Mimmy said, pinchy-voiced, “You can’t load hanging clothes first. They’ll get smushed and have to be re-ironed.”

Walcott stopped obediently and draped my clothes over the duffel, giving me a Walcott look, wry and mock-martyred. He’d walked over yesterday from his momses’ place to help me pack, as his hundred-millionth proof of best-friendhood. Today he’d help load my car and keep Natty entertained on the drive to the condo. The condo was built in a stack of three small floors. The kitchen and living space were at ground, and Dad’s master suite took up the whole middle. Natty and I were taking the two rooms that shared a bath at the very top. Walcott, being Walcott, would carry the heaviest things up all those stairs, while we toted in pillows and Target bags full of shoes. I didn’t even have to drive him home, just drop him at his girlfriend’s place in Inman Park.

He’d been doing crap like this for me since we were both five, the outsiders at a milk-white elementary school in a so-white-it-was-practically-Wonder-Bread county. I was the only half-a-Jew for miles, and Walcott was the sperm-donated product of a pair of lesbians who left Atlanta to grow organic veggies and run a mountain bed-and-breakfast for like-minded ladies. Walcott’s momses engaged in all manner of suspicious behaviors, including Zen meditation and hydroponics. Where we lived, those words were as foreign as Rosh Hashanah or Pesach Seder, strange rites that got me extra days off school and sent me to my dad’s place in Atlanta, where I no doubt painted the doors with lamb blood and burned up doves.

Me and Walcott, we’d stood back-to-back with our swords up, together surviving the savage playgrounds; yet here was Mimmy, giving him the glare she saved for any poor, male fool who got caught by all her immaculately groomed pretty and tried to ask her out. She knew darn well that Walcott didn’t have a sex-crazed man-genda for helping me move, but every now and then, she remembered he technically belonged to the penis-having half of the human race. She’d flick that suspicious, baleful look at him. She’d done it when he was in kindergarten, even. Back then, he’d showed me his penis on a dare, and it had been an innocent pink speck, clearly incapable of plotting.

“This is the last from upstairs. Let’s pack the car after we eat,” Walcott said.

“As long as we get on the road by two. I don’t want to unload in the dark.”

“I’ll dish up lunch,” my mother said, wilting into acceptance. The wilt was a feint. I caught her sloe-eyed side-peek at me as she rolled away against the doorway on her shoulder and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Hoo! You’re so screwed,” Walcott said, grinning. To an outsider, my mother would seem to be in a state of mild, ladylike displeasure, but mainly at peace with the world and all its denizens. But Walcott and I had grown up together, in and out of each other’s houses all day long our whole lives. He could decode the state of the Once and Future Belle from her lipstick colors and the angle of the tortoiseshell combs in her hair almost as well as I could.

“She’s loaded for bear. And I’m bear,” I said.

“I can’t help you with that. No one can.” He flopped into a lanky heap of string on the wingback chair. “But I could say you a poem? I’ve been working on one for you, for this exact occasion.”

“No, thank you,” I said primly.

“It’s really good,” Walcott said. He cleared his throat, putting on a faux beat-poet reading voice, really boomy and pretentious. “Alas! The Jew of Lumpkin County, exiled once more. Like Moses—”

“Poem me no poems, Walcott. I know what you use those things for.” Before he got hooked up kinda serious with CeeCee, his signature move was to quote hot lines from John Donne or Shakespeare to mildly drunken girls in the Math Department.

“They work, though,” he said. “I used to get a lot of play, for a skinny English major with a big nose.”

“Bah! It’s a noble nose.”

“It’s overnoble. It’s noble plus plus. Lucky for me, chicks dig iambic pentameter. But this poem? It’s not for seduction. It’s free verse and quite brilliant. You wander forty days and forty nights in Piedmont Park, following the smoke from a crack pipe by day and a flaming tranny hooker in the night.”

“You’re a goof,” I said, but as always, he’d made me feel better. “Stop it. I have to pacify The Mimmy. Maybe we could crawl to the kitchen with fruit? Throw a virgin into her volcano?”

“Now where are you and I going to find a virgin?” he asked, droll.

I started for the kitchen, then paused under the painting. The new Jesus, with his salon-fresh highlights, had those kind of Uncle Sam eyes that seemed to track after me.

Walcott followed my gaze, craning his head back to look. “Holy crap! Where is Praying Hands Jesus?”

I shrugged. “I know, right?”

“Shandi, that’s your mother in a beard.”

“Yeah. Super unnerving. I don’t expect Jesus to be that . . .”

“Hot,” Walcott said, but he was looking toward the kitchen now, where my mom was. I scooped up one of Natty’s stuffies from the closest laundry basket and chucked it at him. He caught it, laughing. “Aw, don’t throw Yellow Friend!” He tucked this most important blue patchwork rabbit gently back in Natty’s things. “I know she’s your mom. But come on.”

I couldn’t blame him. My mother was forty-four, but she looked ten years younger, and she was nowhere near ready to recover from being beautiful. If I’d been born with a lush mouth and crazy-razor cheekbones, instead of round-faced and regulation cute, I’m not sure I’d recover, either.

“Lunch,” Mimmy called, and we went through to the kitchen table. Natty was there already, perched in the booster so his nose cleared the surface of the high wooden table. Most of his face was hidden by his
Big Book of Bugs
, but I could tell the move was worrying him. All his Matchbox police and EMS vehicles were lined up in front of his plate, and he had big chunks of three of his bravest costumes on: fireman’s yellow slicker, astronaut’s white jumpsuit, airplane pilot’s hat.

“Goodness, Captain Space Fireman, have you seen my kid?”

Natty said, “I am me.”

Walcott said, “Weird. How did a Pilot Space Fireman turn into a Natty Bumppo?”

My tiny literalist lowered the thick volume to give Walcott a grave stare. “These are costumes, Walcott. I was me the whole time.”

I took the seat by him and said, “Oh good, because you are my favorite.”

Walcott sat down across from me.

“Mimmy made cobbler,” Natty told me in his solemn Natty voice.

I nodded, taking it very seriously. “Excellent.”

“Mimmy says I must eat peas,” Natty said next, same tone, but I could tell he believed this to be an injustice.

“Mimmy is very right,” I said.

All our plates were filled and sitting centered on the tatted lace mats. My mother took her place at the head of the table, and we all bowed our heads.

Looking down at my plate while my mother had a cozy premeal chat with Jesus, I realized I’d clocked her mood wrong. She wasn’t sad or wrecked. She’d made chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and peas and fresh biscuits, then swamped the plate in her velvety-fat gravy.

She only cooked for me like this when she was furious. She thought the meanest thing you could do to a woman was to give her a fudge basket; she lived on green salad and broiled chicken, and Mimmy would have still fit into her wedding dress if she hadn’t set it on fire in the middle of the living room when I was Natty’s age. Then she packed me up and moved back here, where she’d grown up.

My angry mother prayed a litany of thanks for food and health and family and put in a word for the Bulldogs approaching fall season. She didn’t go off-book, didn’t exhort the Lord to bring her wayward daughter to a better understanding of His will. In the past, God’s will had so often matched up exactly with my mother’s that she found it worth mentioning. But she closed after the football with a sweet “Amen,” and I upgraded her from merely furious to livid.

Natty amen-ed and then started zooming one of his cop cars back and forth. Walcott dug in, moaning with pleasure at the first bite. He’d eat everything on his plate and then probably finish mine, and I had no idea where it would go. He was six feet tall and built like a Twizzler.

“Eat up, baby,” I told Natty.

“I will. I have to consider the peas,” he said, and I grinned at his little-old-man vocabulary.

My mother had served herself a big old portion as well, and she whacked off a huge bite of fried meat and swabbed it through the potatoes, then put the whole thing directly into her mouth. My eyes widened. I think the last time my mother ate a starch was three years back, when Dad paid my tuition at GSU in full.

I always knew he would, but Mimmy worried he’d cut me off once court-ordered child support for me ended. I wasn’t eligible for most scholarships, even though I’d been an honor student in high school. I’d spent my senior year at home, baking Natty and studying for the GED. When Dad’s check came, she’d gone to the ancient box of Girl Scout Thin Mints in the freezer and had two, which was for her a caloric orgy. She’d purchased those cookies at least four years ago, and she hadn’t so much as worked her way into the second sleeve.

Now she sat quiet, chewing what had to be the best bite to enter her mouth this decade, but it was like she wasn’t even tasting it. She tried to swallow, then stopped. Her face changed and cracked, like she’d been told she was eating the thigh meat of her dearest friend. She spat the wad into a napkin and stood abruptly, chair scraping against the old hardwood floor.