All We Know of Love (2 page)

And if Adam should call —

If he should call —

If he should call, I will be right here to feel the phone vibrate even before it rings.

I hold the phone and rest my head against the window and keep my eyes closed so I don’t have to talk to the lady next to me. She has that look, like someone who likes to care about other people for no reason at all.

I hate that.

If I think really hard, I am pretty sure I remember my mother was doing the dinner dishes that evening. Her soapy hands were dipping in and out of the water, soft white bubbles stuck on the backs of her skinny wrists. My mother always shut off the water while she was washing and turned it on again to rinse. She hated to waste. Hated to use things up that didn’t have to be, like squirting out more liquid soap than needed or taking two napkins when one would do. She folded and reused paper bags and even plastic bags. She was always telling me not to flush the toilet every time. There was no need to waste water and electricity.

That’s disgusting and I’d flush anyway. Every time.

She officially objected to wrapping paper. She flat out refused to buy it. I’d show up at elementary-school birthday parties with my gift packaged in either wrinkled recycled wrapping paper or, worse, the Sunday funnies from the newspaper.

She turned the lights off whenever she left a room. Only turned on what she needed, so in winter our house sat in quiet darkness, illuminated in only one or two small areas. She unplugged the toaster and the coffee machine because she read somewhere they can drain a measurable amount of electricity even when they are not in use.

And when she did the dishes, she’d fill the sink with water, washing each dish and letting it sit. Then she’d turn the tap back on and rinse, efficiently turning each plate or cup or bowl over in her hands, running it under the stream of water and setting it on the rack on the counter.

It’s been over four years, and it is still her hands I remember best. Her long fingers, and the raised veins that wove across the backs of her hands in geometric shapes. To this day I always look at a woman’s hands and see beauty in long bony fingers, blue-veined skin, and short clean nails. A woman’s hands. My mother hated her hands. She said they looked old, while I thought my mother’s hands were beautiful.

Yes, I remember now we were in the kitchen.

She was talking to me and I was eating my dessert. But I wasn’t happy, was I? They were the wrong cookies. I was in the mood for something chocolaty. She had given me oatmeal-raisin cookies and a glass of milk.

She just started talking. “I think I had it all wrong, Natalie. You know, my mother just gave me the worst advice. . . . You know, Nana. But it stuck with me.”

My mother was facing the sink, so my last memories of her are of her back and her hands and the sound of splashing water and her voice. Some part of me knew that she was very upset. I knew she was crying. But a bigger part of me didn’t want to hear it or see it.

I wanted different cookies. Chocolate cookies.

So I was just waiting for a pause in her monologue, when I could ask her if I could open a new box of cookies. It was a risk, I knew. My mother didn’t like to open a new box until the old one was finished. She didn’t like having things that didn’t get completely used up, that would go stale and thus be wasted.

But I wanted
chocolate
cookies. Wasn’t it a waste to eat something you didn’t really want? Isn’t that a waste, too?

I didn’t like the look of her shoulders hunched over the sink, shaking. The deliberate movement of her arms reaching over and placing dish after dish in the draining rack. She was still talking, her voice quivering.

“I don’t ever want to give you that kind of advice. . . .”

But I wasn’t listening anymore. Her words turned into some kind of gibberish, some other language I couldn’t understand and so didn’t have to listen to. A grown-up language I wasn’t supposed to hear. The more desperate she became, the more I wanted those chocolate cookies. I knew there were some in the pantry. I had seen them. I was sure.

I was just waiting for my moment to ask.

“There’s something I want to tell you, Natty. . . .”

I already had a whole convincing argument ready for why opening a new box of cookies would make sense, be ultimately less wasteful. Just imagine my genius.

But my mother went on. “I mean, Natalie, I want to tell you. I think you should understand this about —”

Our voices collided and hers was swallowed up like beach sand under the tide. “Mom?”

“— about love.”

I stopped her cold. “I want chocolate cookies.”

She turned from the sink and looked right at me. Her eyes were swollen, even redder than I was expecting. Her face was wet, and her nose and her chin. She reached out with her hands because they were soapy and she couldn’t wipe her eyes. She held them out as if she didn’t know what else to do with them.

“I mean, Mom? Can I open the chocolate cookies? I saw some in the pantry. I know the oatmeal cookies aren’t finished . . . but can I?”

I began to list my really good reasons, but I didn’t have to.

“Sure, sweetie,” my mother said. Her voice was strange.

I remember she walked over to the table where I was sitting and took the half-empty package of oatmeal-raisin cookies. Then she stepped right over to our new trash can with its flip top. When we bought it I thought it was really cool. My mom stepped on the foot lever.

My heart stopped beating.

I was flooded with the sense that I had done something wrong. Very wrong.

I watched as my mother dropped the entire package of cookies into the garbage. Then she took the chocolate cookies from the pantry and placed them before me.

“Do you have enough milk?” she asked calmly. Her tears had dried, but her face still looked blotchy and awful.

I nodded, wide-eyed and fearful.

And she left.

She took her coat from the peg by the door. She jangled her keys in her pocket, and she stepped out quietly into the night.

When I was in fifth grade, about ten or eleven years old, just about a year before my mother decided to jump ship, bail out, skip town and never come back again, I had a very specific idea about who I was going to fall in love with. It never occurred to me then that he might not fall in love with me in return.

Such a thing as an Adam was beyond my imagining.

Such a thing as the agony that love brings had never entered my mind. Before Adam, love was a happy ending, like an episode of
Full House.
Or the kind of book your grandmother gives you.

We even had a list, my friend Sarah and I. I mean, a real list. Written down. On paper.

We would add to it whenever we got together, whenever we had a sleepover. It was an official rule. You packed your toothbrush, your hairbrush, lip gloss, pajamas, your favorite stuffed animal, and the list. The list traveled back and forth between our houses that entire year.

“I’ve got a new one,” Sarah told me. Her out-of-breath voice betrayed her excitement. This would be a good one.

We were already in our pajamas. Sarah’s mother had dragged out a futon, two pillows, sheets, two huge comforters and let us sleep in the front room: the den, with the TV, the DVD player, and the computer. We had spent most of the night IM-ing and the rest of the night watching the movie we had rented. It was now dark and quiet; the rest of the household had long since gone to bed. That was another rule. Writing on the list must be the last thing we did before we went to sleep, when we were too tired to do anything else, so thoughts of our true love would be our last thoughts before sleep and therefore penetrate our dreams.

That way, they would one day come true.

“OK, I’m ready,” I said. I had had the list at my house, and now I took it out of my backpack and carefully unfolded it. The paper was threatening to break apart at the folds. It hung limp and I had to support it from the underside on my open palm.

“Read,” Sarah commanded.

I began. We had eleven written requirements for our true love so far. I would read each one, and then Sarah would present her latest. Then we would vote. If we both agreed, it would then be added to the list. So far only one suggestion had been voted off: He must be handsome.

We argued about this for a while. It had been my suggestion at first, but when it went up for a vote, ironically, I was the one who lobbied against it. I convinced Sarah that handsome was in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. That if you love someone, he is automatically handsome to you. Sarah argued that you needed to find someone attractive before you could fall in love with him. Not if you are of pure heart, I came back with. In the end, it was
Beauty and the Beast,
which we had both seen on Broadway, that ultimately settled things. Handsome didn’t make the list, not in that form exactly.

Now Sarah nudged me and I began to read the list from the beginning.

“Number one: He must think you are the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.

“Number two: He must say so, constantly.

“Number three: He must be smart (at least in advanced reading or higher math).

“Number four: He must . . .”

I didn’t stop until I had read all that we had so far. Eleven rules for the boy we were to love, and it wasn’t until I had finished all eleven that Sarah revealed her latest.

“He won’t hug you; he will embrace you,” Sarah said.

“What’s the difference?”

Sarah sighed as if I were the most naive girl in the whole wide world. But she was my best friend, and best friends help each other out with this sort of thing.

“A hug is what your dad or mom gives you. And you give them,” she tried to explain. “But an embrace . . .” Sarah suddenly stood up on her futon. She turned her back and wrapped her arms tightly around herself.

“An embrace is like all the world disappears and all there is, is you and him.” She spoke into the air as if announcing a proclamation to the world. “Love will be the most wonderful thing. We will know it the minute we see him.”

I jumped up beside her. “But we won’t let on. . . .”

“Not right at first,” Sarah added.

My face felt flushed with excitement. We stood on the futon with our arms wrapped around our shoulders, our imaginary love inhabiting our own bodies.

“No, first,” I said, “we will make him . . . wait.”

Sarah pretended to kiss her embracing lover, and the sight of her lips pursed into the air dropped me into a fit of giggles.

But in the end, and a mere five years later, in tenth grade, Adam matched one, maybe two, of the twenty rules Sarah and I had eventually laid out.

All that hard work. Poof. Gone in about five seconds, in about as long as it took Adam to call me “baby” for the first time, like I was something to be nurtured and taken care of. It took only for Adam to whisper that he had always thought I was beautiful and smart.

And, oh, so special.

Poof.

Because it didn’t mean what I thought it would mean. None of it.

All that hard work for nothing.

Sarah doesn’t know where I am. She doesn’t even know about the package that came in the mail a couple of months ago.

My dad had a funny look on his face when he handed it to me. I knew even before I saw the address, the handwriting, the inside-out brown-paper-bag wrapping, the stamps, or the masking tape holding the whole thing together. I knew it was from my mother. My dad and I didn’t talk about it then. Maybe we were both too much in shock, although I knew my dad had spoken with her a few times over the years. I knew my dad knew where she was, that she was OK.

But that she wasn’t coming back.

At least not for the time being.

But this was the first time she was contacting me.

She had sent me a present, which I quickly stashed away in a drawer in my room. I didn’t open it for a long time. It was the wrapper I was more interested in, because from it, I learned that when my mother ran away, she went to Florida.

Sarah doesn’t know about any of this, but I guess it kind of fits that she doesn’t. When I stopped telling Sarah
everything,
I stopped telling her anything. I didn’t tell her about Adam. And then suddenly there were way too many things I hadn’t told her, to tell her about the package.

Besides, sometimes I think Sarah was madder about what my mom did than I was.

So, what would Sarah think now, if she could see me sitting on this bus?

“He ain’t worth it, honey.”

“Huh?”

I open my eyes when I realize the lady next to me is talking to me. It was like she had been reading my mind, clicking away with her knitting needles, divining my thoughts.

“You’ve been crying,” she says. “You’re too pretty to be worried about your looks, and you’re too young to be worried about money. So that leaves only one thing.”

I don’t say anything, but I look at her.

“Boy trouble,” she says. She clicks away, metal against metal. Their sound is lost in the noise of the bus, the hum of the engine, and the thumping of the tires, and the voices of the passengers. Everyone on this bus seems to know somebody else. Or they are just more friendly than I am.

“It helps to talk about it,” the lady is saying, her knitting needles clicking in a rhythmic pair.

“No, it won’t,” I answer, and I am looking out the window again.

“Oh, yes. It will. It always does. Sometimes, you know it’s just the sound of your own voice. Just hearing it out loud. Sometimes you sound so crazy, you’ve just got to start laughing at yourself.”

Maybe she thinks she will trick me into talking to her by doing all the talking herself.

“And sometimes, it makes you cry. But you know, I worked with this Jewish lady lawyer for a couple of years. I was a paralegal. And you know what she used to say?”

Usually my skin prickles when I hear someone talk like that:
Jewish lady.
But for some reason, this time I don’t mind. It doesn’t seem to mean anything. And I know she is waiting for me to ask, so I say, “What?”