All We Know of Love (5 page)

Something about what Charlene says makes me look down at my cell phone again. There is no message icon blinking. I flip it open and check missed calls, just to make sure. I check my reception bars and then my missed calls again. I think about calling for my messages to make double sure, but Charlene is watching me. I feel her thoughts, as if they are pressed upon my body.

He was dark. Darker than she was. So dark she could see the shot of red in the white of his eyes. The color of his eyes, so dark she couldn’t see their centers. The palms of his hands seemed to glow in the night, moving across her body. His lips were like warmth itself. Charlene had never felt so beautiful. She had, in fact, never felt beautiful before.

“We barely know each other,” she whispered. Her parents were sleeping. They were sleeping in the upstairs bedroom. This house was incredible, so open. The warm air, the constant breezes, the smell of flowers and rain drifting in through the wide-open shades, the lifted screens. There were porches off every door, where the ocean rose and fell, calling out, even when it couldn’t be directly seen.

The sand was pure white. The sky was a new color entirely, cobalt blue. The house was peach with turquoise storm shutters. Jamaica was like a storybook. It was as if you took the East Bronx, put it in a dictionary, and tried to find its exact opposite, its polar self. The farthest place from everything Charlene had ever known or seen, or smelled or tasted or heard.

“I know
you,
” he whispered back. “I’ve been watching you for days. I have such an appetite for you, Charlie.”

Even though those words rang in her mind like lyrics to a song that someone else wrote, she let them be sung to her. His accent like music, his name was Eldon.

There must be a reason, Charlene thought, that her dad won this trip. His promotion at work, a week in Jamaica, a private house on the beach. A cook. And Eldon, who had been introduced to them by the real estate lady, as the “house boy” as he carried their luggage into the house.

Nothing like this happens by accident. Some people were meant to find each other, even across an ocean.

And to think, at first she hadn’t wanted to go.

I don’t care if Daddy won some stupid vacation at his boss’s house. I won’t know anybody. I can stay home alone. You and Daddy and Trevor can go. I don’t want to go. There won’t be anyone my age. You can’t make me go.

Charlene had tested into the Bronx High School of Science, and her parents made her attend. Every day she was surrounded by bone-china – skinned Asian kids and super-smart white kids from Manhattan, who came in throngs off the subway each morning, and only three kids from her own neighborhood, all boys. And not only that but she had also moved up a grade years ago, making her only fifteen years old and a senior in high school. She was too smart, too young, and too dark, and none of those things equaled beauty.

Until now. Until Eldon.

“I love you,” he told her. He slipped his hand under her shirt, and the remarkable feel of his skin on her skin — on her back, on her belly, on her ribs — took her breath away.

“You are so beautiful” over and over with his singsongy accent.

He also told her he had never seen a black family staying in this house where he worked. Families came and went, some tipped more than others, but the one constant was that they were all white as ghosts. Until Charlene.

Until you.

Her blackness was beauty here. It seemed destined to stand out against the turquoise sky and the white, white sand. In Jamaica, where everyone was dark, darker and even darker than that, she was a vision. Her hair was beauty here. Her lips, her nose. She didn’t have to stare in the mirror as she did back home, searching to match the words she would say to the face she saw.
Black is beautiful. Black is beautiful.

Here, it was unspoken. Here it simply was, and always had been.

Here was Eldon, and she melted into the beauty that was power. Into the power that was belief. Into the belief that this was love.

When Charlene tells me she’s getting off here, just before we cross over the bridge, my stomach twists into a familiar, unpleasant sort of discomfort.

“I thought you were going to Delaware,” I say for some reason. “This is still New Jersey.”

Mount Laurel, the driver just announced.

“I know, baby, but it’s closest. My nephew Ralphie is picking me up here.”

She is already gathering her belongings, her knitting, her paperback book, her packages of food.

I have never been good at saying good-bye. Never. But it strikes me as odd that I feel this way about a woman I met three hours ago. A woman I will never see again. I mean, I guess there’s a chance, but the odds are millions, billions to one that our lives will cross again. So why?

Why do I feel anxious that she is leaving?

And sad.

“Look, little lady,” she is saying to me. She is standing in the aisle. No one else, it seems, is getting off here. The whole bus is waiting, but Charlene doesn’t seem to care. She talks as slowly and for as long as she wants. I like that about her. You’ve got to admire that.

“You take care of that shoulder now,” she says.

“What?”

“Your pitching arm.” She smiles at me. “And the whole rest of yourself, when you figure that out.”

“Right,” I say.

“You know what I’m talking about.” But she doesn’t move away. “Stand up now,” Charlene orders me.

I do, and she puts her arms around me. She smells like floral perfume, and when I look at her face, really look at her, I see she is beautiful. Sometimes I am uneasy hugging people, grown-ups especially, but Charlene doesn’t have any room for that. She does all the hugging, and she does the letting go when she’s good and ready.

“I’ll take care of myself. I will, Charlene,” I tell her. “I promise you.”

The driver had gotten off the bus to get her suitcase out. Now he’s waiting by the door, waiting to get going again, like everyone else on the bus.

“Don’t promise
me,
girl,” Charlene says.

And she is gone.

Along with the hum of the bus engine, the smells of food, and human bodies too long without fresh air, I am alone again, and I allow myself to drift into a daydream world of partial memories and partial fantasy, all involving Adam, until the bus begins to lurch in a series of staccato spasms.

I wonder if there is something wrong with the bus.

I try to ignore this and linger in the feeling of Adam touching me while it is still alive in my mind. My skin tightens and trembles as if it is real, even as my brain and my heart know it is not.

This bus is really making odd noises.

I open my eyes and look out the window as the driver pulls off the highway at the first exit. The bus slows to a stop along a busy stretch of the service road. I see a bunch of gas stations and two fast-food restaurants, a video store, a Kmart, and across the street is a diner that sits slightly apart.
OUR DOG HOUSE
, the sign on the roof reads.

It looks like a house really, a house with a trailer attached and a sign on its roof in the shape of a giant hot dog.

T
he driver tells us he needs to stop the bus. He tells us not to get off, he’ll only be a minute, and if something is wrong he’ll radio for another bus. But after about ten minutes with the sun beating through the windows, a bunch of people get up anyway and are standing around the side of the road.

I am one.

I should probably call my dad, but I don’t have a good enough signal. As I walk toward the end of the bus and then a little more toward the street, I get another bar on my cell phone.

It turns out I get the best reception right inside Our Dog House, which it turns out
is
somebody’s house with a trailer attached. The trailer part is the diner. There is a long counter with stools and some booths against the far wall. There is one person working: a young girl behind the counter.

Now I can call my dad and pretend I am on my way to Vermont. I know parents like to think that cell phones have allowed them to keep better track of their teenagers, but they are always a few steps behind.

My dad doesn’t answer, so better still, I leave a message and then shut my phone off to save power.

“You gonna order something?” The girl behind the counter talks to me.

And suddenly I realize I am nauseous, or hungry again. All I’ve had is half a bologna sandwich and a carrot stick since six thirty this morning.

“Yeah,” I answer, taking a seat on one of the round red stools.

The waitress hands me a menu, but I already know what I want, and I order it. It is what I always order in a place like this: grilled cheese on white and a chocolate milk shake. My mom and I used to get the exact same thing every time we went to the diner on the post road in Westport on my way to Hebrew school. Every Wednesday for two years, grilled cheese and a chocolate milk shake. She got the same thing, except she had tomato on her grilled cheese, and instead of a milk shake she got a chocolate egg cream, which has neither eggs nor cream.

“You know what?” I say suddenly. “Can I change that? Can I have an egg cream instead? Chocolate?”

“A what?”

I forgot. You don’t have to go too far out of the tristate area before no one has ever heard of an egg cream. I read the signs as we crossed the state lines. Delaware for a split second and now we are in Maryland. No egg creams.

“Nah, forget it. I’ll just have water.”

As the waitress is talking to me, I realize she probably isn’t much older than I am. I’m almost sixteen. Maybe she’s seventeen. Maybe. She seems kind of unhappy to be where she is, which is OK because I am feeling pretty much the same.

“Grill cheese and a water . . .” She hurries off to take someone else’s order.

I am just sitting, letting my knees knock against the back of the counter, letting the stool rock one way and then the other, waiting for my sandwich. The stool makes a funny squeaking sound when it spins left and a thunking noise when it stops forward again. I’d liked going to Hebrew school, which is pretty weird in itself. Maybe I just liked the special time with my mom. I had her all to myself. There were no phones to answer. She couldn’t go lie down in her room with the door shut. She couldn’t fight with my dad or stare at the TV. She’d ask me about school, about my homework, my friends.

I remember I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I wanted to be just like her. She had long hair — blond, kind of thin and wispy. Pieces of it would be lifted upward at the slightest wind. When the afternoon light came right in through the large windows by our booth, her hair would look like a halo. She was tiny, my mom. Thin, small-boned. Tiny, like you wanted to pick her up and carry her away. Frail, like she
wanted
to be picked up and carried away.

Not like me at all.

I was never tiny. I am tall, but not because I have long, modelly legs. I am just tall. I wore a size eight-and-a-half shoe by the time I was in eighth grade. I was born with a thick head of dark brown hair that just got thicker and curlier every year.

I’m pretty sure I was born big.

One thing I do know for certain: I was born by mistake.