Split Just Right (10 page)

As I’m heading out the door for school Monday morning, though, I see a note on the table that reads:

For the dance.

Next to the note is a blank check made out to Nyheim’s. I guiltily crumple the check into my pocket. After school, Portia and I go to Nyheim’s and I get a yellow dress on sale that Portia swears makes me look like Princess Di but I think makes my skin look jaundiced. Still, I know better than to stand in the way of Portia’s fashion authority.

That evening, I spread the dress over the back of the couch and leave her a note.

Thanks, Mom.

I know she sees the dress and the note when she gets back from her shift that night, but she doesn’t come into my room. She walks past my closed door and then shuts the door to her room. The apartment seems emptier at that moment than it ever does when I’m here by myself.

A chunk of reality can be as tricky to catch as it is to throw, especially if someone’s throwing while you aren’t looking. When Ty Amblin called to cancel our date the night before the Spring Fling, the hurt of it caught me off guard. The reason Ty gave was this:

“The problem is, my aunt just had a baby and she and my uncle are going to be staying with us this weekend, and my mom’s having a fit that we’re all home for family stuff. Big dinner, you know the drill.”

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” I say. My scalp and neck jolt with shock prickles. What a pathetic excuse. All I want is to get off the phone. “Can you hang on a second?” I ask. I cover the receiver with my hand. “Coming, I’m coming!” I yell through the empty apartment. “My mom’s calling,” I explain. “I better go.”

“Sorry about this whole thing,” Ty says. “I hope it doesn’t rot too much.”

“Well. I guess not too much. So …” I pause, wanting to hang up and half hoping that he’ll save me by suggesting something else, another plan, anything. But the line goes quiet, and then I feel even more stupid and desperate. “Talk to you later,” I say quickly.

“Yep,” he practically carols.

I stare at the phone for a long time after hanging up, chewing my nails. Then I grab the receiver and press speed dial number three.

“You’re kidding,” Portia says. “Oh my God, what a creep. I’m going to cancel on Jess.”

“Don’t,” I say. “That’d only be dumb.” We fall into silence, just sitting together over the wire.

“Portia, do you think he bagged out because I’m? …” It’s hard to come out and say it. I try to go around another way. “Is there any thing you know about Ty, anything that would make you think he might not want to hang out with me because of, I don’t know, like living out in Foxwood or, you know how I told you about that thing with Lacy and Hannah in the library, or Mom’s job—anything like that?”

“I don’t know, but Ty Amblin’s a jerk and a snob and I totally hate him,” Portia says, and her words pounce on Ty so quick and mean that they make me feel more certain that my instincts are right. Portia probably feels weird telling me. “Those cheesy golf sweaters?” she says instead. “And I saw him at the club the other day and he was wearing these pants with a little squash racquet design on them. I mean, one thing if it’s a belt, but pants? He should go ahead and date that worm-face Hannah, didn’t people marry their cousins in olden days?”

“Yeah, and then all their kids would have that disease.”

“Hemophilia,” Portia says. “Isn’t that it? Ty definitely did not belong with you.”

“Definitely not.” And then I have to spend about ten minutes convincing Portia that it’s okay for her to go to the dance without me.

“But I’m not going to have any fun,” she insists.

After hanging up, I plop a pillow inside my tortoise-shell and roll into a ball, just listening to myself breathe in and out, long trembly breaths, while the sunlight slips out of my room. My mind is jumping everywhere at once, spinning me around with questions I don’t know how to answer. Is there anyone else I could take? (No.) Do I even want to go at all? (Not really.) Did Hannah tell Ty about my zipper boots? (Probably) Do I really want to sit around by myself on Saturday night? (No, but I bet I will.) The only reason I wanted to go to the Fling was because of Ty. I don’t want to go alone, and I don’t want Portia figuring out some kind of awful last-minute setup.

I picture Mom and Rick Finzimer, dancing together at her spring formal. He wears a flashy tie and she’s dressed in my yellow dress from Nyheim’s. Was Rick Finzimer ever ashamed of Mom? Were his nails soft and polished like Ty Amblin’s? I bet my nails grossed Ty out. I bet he never really wanted to go to the dance with me. He just knew that I liked him and would have gone with anybody, until Lacy and Hannah informed him that showing up with me would be worse than showing up with a giant jaundiced yellow cockroach.

I drag myself into the living room to watch TV while painting my nails with some gluey red nail polish I discovered under the couch. I try to stop the sad feelings from squirming into my heart, which I picture in the shape of one of the decoration flowers we tacked up in the gym for the Fling: pink and flat and papery, easy to scrunch.

When Mom comes home I feel too stupid to tell her about Ty plus then I’d have to apologize for our fight, even though I wouldn’t call it a fight exactly, anymore. It’s more of that unsure, niggly stage right before a truce. So I stay in my room. But she decides to make dinner and then I have to sit at the table and eat an evil plateful of tuna fish sandwiches and cauliflower. I chew and swallow in silence. Mom reads a magazine. I clean up the kitchen without being asked. The quietness in the apartment hurts almost as much as the imaginary brawling conversations I’m having with Ty Amblin in my brain.

Saturday is opening night for
As You Like It
.

“Have a good time at the dance,” Mom says as she heads out the door. Her voice isn’t friendly or mean; I could answer nicely or not at all. She really knows how to deliver her lines perfectly; there’s no substitute for that kind of talent. I decide to answer seminicely

“Okay, I will.”

“And are you staying over at Portia’s?”

“I guess so.” It takes every nonbabyish, unselfish feeling inside me to keep from running to the door, stopping her, and pouring out my problems. I really don’t want to be by myself tonight, which now stretches before me in all its miserable, agonizing hours of lying around, flipping through magazines or TV channels, thinking about the dance. “Break a leg tonight,” I add after a second’s thought.

“Thanks.” She smiles, a real smile that might mean we’re on the road to patching things up. But then she opens and walks out the door, locking the deadbolt with a purposeful, leaden clunk that makes me feel like a prisoner. Now I am officially trapped inside my horrible Saturday night.

The phone rings and some cruelly optimistic voice inside me convinces me that it’s Ty. Would I still go to the dance with him, even last minute? No. Yes. No.

I pick up the phone and take a breath.

“Hello?”

“Hi.”

“Oh. Hey, Gary.”

“I just made a beautiful chef’s salad,” he says. “And I thought I could bring you a Breedshow princess-size portion, to give you enough energy for the ball.”

“Oh, Gary, that’s so nice of you,” I say. “But I’m not … it’s just one of those, see I’m not exactly … see Gar, it’s a long story.” I am trying very hard not to sound too pathetic, but I guess I must, because the next thing I know Gary is at the door, holding a bowl of chef’s salad in one hand and half a loaf of his awful health-food-store, honey-sweetened walnut bread in the other.

“I’m in the mood for a long story,” he says, “as long as you have forks.”

The truth is that it’s not a long story at all. It’s a short angry one. I don’t bother to act like Miss Cool when I tell it, like I sort of did with Portia. Gary knows me too well. And then, I don’t know why—mostly I think it’s just because I’m not ready to stop crying yet—but I start talking to him all about Rick Finzimer, and how he manages to crawl his way inside my thoughts more than I’d like him to, these days.

“I can’t help wishing I could pick up the phone and talk to him every once in while,” I say As soon as I’ve said it out loud, I know it’s true. “Like if I ever get a not horrible grade in math, or when I didn’t know whether to get Mom those earrings for her birthday. I guess I want to share life stuff with him. A good time or a bad time, or anything.”

“You know, Wombat, I hope you always know you can rely on me to talk to and do some of that parent duty.”

“Oh, I know,” I say quickly. I don’t mean to hurt Gary’s feelings. “It’s more that I wish Rick Finzimer cared in the first place. And it’s not like I’m constantly moping about him; I mean, the fact that I miss him at all kind of surprises me.”

“I hear you,” Gary says. He turns his attention to the bread, cutting a small slice for himself and a huge chunk for me. “Some days when I’m at work, and I’ll be having a good day, kind of involved in it, kind of distracted, that’s when Elliot hits me. Just like—gotcha.” He snaps his fingers. “It’s this split moment of ‘Hang on—why isn’t this day as good as I think?’ And at the same time, I’m swamped by my remembering, by a, I don’t know, maybe a drowning feeling, like a realization of ‘Oh, yeah, that’s right, Elliot’s dead, remember? Remember how the person you loved more than anyone in the world is gone for good?’”

I don’t know if Gary means to say this last sentence out loud and for a moment we have to sit back from it. Then he laughs and shakes his head a little as if to shake off his thoughts.

“I doubt if I can finish this monster slab of walnut bread,” I say, to lighten the mood.

“It’s revolting,” Gary agrees, rolling his eyes. “Don’t bother.”

“Well, if it’s revolting, why do you keep buying it?” I ask.

“I have friends at the health food store,” he says. “They were friends of Elliot’s actually. They sucker me into buying all the food that’s not selling.”

“So this bread actually is Elliot’s fault,” I say with a smile.

“Hey, I guess it is.” Gary nods. “Blame dessert on him.”

“Thanks a lot, Elliot.” I make a face. “This bread tastes like Styrofoam.”

“Yep, thanks, Elliot,” Gary says. “You and your legacy of tofu-chomping, tree-hugging friends.” Gary waves his sliver of bread at the ceiling. We laugh together, which feels good after an evening of so many sad words.

Later that night I wake up to the sound of Mom’s keys jingling softly in the lock. My clock says 3:12 A.M.; Mom must have gone to the cast party at Louis’s house after. When I was little and Mom came home from shows, she’d always tap on my door and whisper, “Still awake?” and if I was (and I always was because my sleep-ears were trained to hear her voice thanking and paying the baby-sitter), I would jump out of my bed, into her room, and jump in her bed. Then she’d tell me about her night and I’d tell her about mine.

I wish I could ask her how opening night went, if Duke Senior missed his final cue, and if Laura cut Mom off in their “I pray thee, Rosalind, be merry” scene in act 1.

And I wish I could tell her about jerkhead Ty.

But tonight there’s no tap.

The next morning I wake up early, ready for some kind of a truce. I run out to the 7-Eleven and buy honey-glazed doughnuts and two coffees and the paper and even a bunch of daisies, arranging everything on the coffee table in the living room, like it’s a fancy hotel continental breakfast.

“You’re great,” Mom says, smiling and rubbing her eyes when she sees the table. Faint traces of eyeliner smudge down her cheeks. “But why aren’t you at Portia’s?”

“Ty canceled last minute. He turned out to be sort of creepy.”

Mom’s face holds no expression of pity or sadness or any of those things that make me feel more stupid than I do already. She just shakes her head and bites into her doughnut, then she says, “There was this show I did once where someone, I think it was the gruff grandfather character, said, ‘Some people don’t split right when you cut them open.’ I can’t remember the play but I never forgot that line.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of how he was.”

“But you must be depressed,” Mom says carefully.

“I am,” I answer. “I just don’t feel like talking about it right now.” I’m glad I already poured everything out on Gary instead of Mom. Sometimes Gary makes a good fallback person.

We drink coffee and read the paper and life feels back to seminormal again. After a while, I stand up to go to my room, deciding finally to start my
Odyssey
paper, when there’s a soft knock on the door.

“Who’s that?”

“Will you get that, it’s probably Gary,” Mom says. “He said he might come by to borrow our waffle maker.”

Expecting Gary but then seeing another face is like taking a sip of milk and finding out it’s really lemonade; it’s the sheer surprise that scares you most. I catch my breath in a scream and jump back like a spooked cat when I see the strange man lurking in our doorway. It only takes me a second to recognize him, which answers a question I’d asked myself my whole life: Would I instantly know my father if I saw him?

Tall. That’s the second thing I think. Rick Finzimer is really tall and rangy, like me. The third thing I think is that he looks scared.

“H
I,” I SAY IN
a voice that gets swallowed up in my throat. Rick Finzimer’s nervous gaze holds mine for a long second, and then his eyes find Mom. The stare and silence last a long time.

“I thought we’d made a deal,” he says to her. “You and I.” I move like a slow propeller, shifting to look over at Mom, who is sitting motionless. She’s holding her paper coffee cup in midair. Her face is a replica of Annie Sullivan’s expression at the end of the play, when she hears Helen say “wa-wa,” and in her eyes you see all the disbelief and shock and feverish excitement of something incredible coming true.

“Richard,” she says. She touches her fingers to her temples and her hair, and her eyes grow into two Os that take over her entire face.

Meanwhile, all I can do is soak in all this dumb information: how Rick Finzimer’s soft tassel shoes are the same kind as Mr. Paulson’s, how he has reddish blond hair that sprouts from a bed of freckles on his wrists and hands, that he’s wearing a sharp cologne I recognize as Bay Rum, because Louis wears too much of it, too.