I'm Not Your Other Half (3 page)

Oh, no, I thought. Oh, Annie, don't fall for Price Quincy, please.

I would have worried, but Michael sat next to me, and I forgot Annie. They were inches from us; we could easily have addressed them over the seat back, but we never even thought of them. We talked of ordinary things, mostly school, yet the conversation was intense. It was intimacy with a pause. I was considering each syllable before I uttered it. Saying to myself, Yes, I'll be that honest; it's safe.

With Annie, everything simply poured out.

Someday, Michael and I will know each other well enough that we won't stop to deliberate, I thought. There will be no walls between us.

I was astonished when we arrived at State: I had not noticed a single spine-splitting pothole, a single red light.

Oh, Fraser MacKendrick, I thought, as Michael and I got up and he folded the Depression quilt over his arm and stood back to let me out of the seat. Have you got it bad!

The bleachers at State are stone, set into the hillside like an ancient Greek stadium. The wind came through the goal posts and tore cruelly up the stone stands and through our clothing. I had no choice. I took my crumpled sagging old gray wool hat out of my jacket pocket.

“What's that?” said Michael. “It looks like a litter of gray mice.”

Annie giggled. “It's her bunny hat, Michael. Fray has tender ears.”

Michael looked at my ears with interest. It was the first time my ears had ever served a better purpose than providing holes for my earrings. “I don't know about tender,” he said, “but they sure are red.” He took the hat from my stiff fingers and fluffed it out, sticking his fist inside for a model head. “Wild!” he said, laughing. “Where did you get this? It's so old-fashioned.” He put it on me, accidently bending my ears forward. I reached up to unfold them, and our hands touched: frozen flesh against frozen flesh. The vapor from our warm laughter rose up between us.

“That reminds me of a shower at my house,” said Michael.

“What, you don't have hot water?” I exclaimed. “How Spartan.”

“We have hot water. We just don't have water pressure. We don't even call it a shower. We call it a mist. As in,
‘Michael, are you out of the mist yet?'”

Not too far from us, two teams were playing football, and around us people shouted and cheered, but among the four of us, there was just talk and touching and laughter. Wouldn't it be incredible, I thought, if both Annie and I found the right boys at the same time, in each other's company? Could anything on earth be finer than both of us becoming couples at the same moment? I struggled to like Price, but clearly this was easier for Annie than for me.

“Let's have something hot to eat,” said Price. “My treat, Annie. French fries, cheeseburgers, fried onions and hot chocolate. Okay?”

“Wonderful,” agreed Annie, although she hates fried onions even if it's somebody else eating them. She doesn't like hot chocolate either and has had coffee every morning since she was very little (which may have been a contributing factor to her height).

“That means you and I get roast beef on hard rolls,” I told Michael. “Also bananas and pickles.”

“Bananas and pickles,” said Michael. “My favorite combination.”

I was warm only on my left side, from my knee to my shoulder, where Michael and I were leaning against each other. “This is like trying to get warm in front of a fireplace,” I said.

“Try my lap.”

I slid onto his lap. It was a perfect fit. I am tall, but Michael is taller. I could actually snuggle against him. I loved it.

I was aware of every inch of him—his wide-wale cords, the frayed belt strung through the loops, the pale-gray striped oxford shirt under the heavy gray hand-knit sweater.

I turned my head to rest against him, and Annie was nodding at me, a secret smile on her lips. In the air she traced a shape. Another person might think it was a smile, or a crescent moon. I knew it was a watermelon.

“M
OM?” I SAID AT
breakfast. I was now three days, or seventy-two hours, into my crush on Michael. “Would it be all right if I took the car today?” I handed her a plate of buttered whole-wheat toast with bacon and a sliced banana.

My mother is flustered at breakfast. She is not a morning person, and having to be well-dressed, well-groomed and well-fed, all before seven-thirty, looms large five mornings a week.

She eyed the clock. “I guess so. But that means you'll have to drive me first and come back to drive your father. And pick us up in reverse order. Honestly, I wish we had two cars. If we weren't saving for your college … Oh, dear, Fraser, look at this button hanging by one thread. Now I'll have to change my blouse.” She kicked off her high heels for more running speed and dashed up to her room to get another blouse.

My father, who sits quietly in the corner of the breakfast room until poor Mom has fled the premises, sipped his coffee. “Why do you want the car, honey? It's so much trouble.”

Because I need more than eighteen seconds after my last class. Because I intend to drift down the hall and find Michael Hollander. Because I want to be able to go somewhere with him, instead of race like a rabbit for the bus.

“Because I have to work on my botany lab project after school,” I said.

My father is very proud of my lab project. Twice he's gone to school to discuss it with my teacher. I am the only student taking both chemistry and botany, and my father daydreams more about my future than I do. I don't have the slightest idea what my future is going to be, but every day Dad comes up with a new possibility. Actually I took two sciences mostly to get them over with, but he is convinced he has a future Nobel Prizewinner on his hands. “Oh, well,” he said happily. “In that case, drive your mother and I'll walk down to Chapel Street and catch the commuter bus so you don't have to drive me as well.”

I felt a stab of guilt, but it wasn't much of a stab. More of a paper cut. Michael seemed to have come right into the breakfast room with us filling the very air with his desirable presence, and he was all that mattered.

Of course, when I arrived at the school lot after dropping Mom off, every single slot was filled. I had to drive all the way down Buckley to find a parallel parking space, and then run back five blocks over patches of ice where last night's drizzle had frozen in the dawn cold, and I was late to homeroom.

One of the advantages to being a star student is that you never get into trouble. Your teachers automatically assume that you were doing something of vital importance, like inoculating your corn with nitrogen-fixing blue-green algae. Sure enough, nobody said a word.

I had thought last week of going for a few long country walks after school. If I followed the meadow path in back of the yards of Coventry Road, I could scout out wild grapevine and bittersweet that clung to the trees along the meadow rim. My master plan for Christmas included making bittersweet wreaths for all my Christmas presents. Gray-brown vines with the bright piercing orange and scarlet berries and perhaps a bright calico ribbon. I could store them in the garage on the rafter nails until December tenth or so, and then give them out.

Was Michael the gathering-bittersweet type?

If the opportunity came up for me to suggest a date, what would I say? A movie? A meal? A walk down Coventry meadow path?

If he wasn't the type, I would not bother. I would buy everybody something at the gift shop instead.

After school I dawdled to my locker. There was no way for Michael to know which of the three thousand lockers in school was mine. I detested Chapman High for being so large. In any decent small school a few turns around a central hall and you would have located anybody. But I could wander the halls of Chapman for two hours and still not encounter Michael Hollander.

When fifteen minutes passed without a trace of Michael (Come now, Fraser, I thought, a trace? What did you expect? The lingering scent of his aftershave to guide you?), I went down to work on my corn after all.

Ah, the Goddess of Love and Crushes.

She had directed Michael to the botany lab, and he was just leaving, looking sorrowful—because I wasn't there.

“Hi, Michael.”

His head turned, his eyes lit on me, his lips moved into a smile. “Hi, Fraser.”

We were locked in appreciation of each other, and we laughed slightly, like children, linking hands and walking instinctively toward the parking lot. Michael, evidently sharing all my thoughts, had driven
his
father's car.

There is nothing,
nothing,
more awkward than two people in love driving separate cars.

We got into Michael's car in the student lot (he had arrived early) and drove five blocks down Buckley where I hopped out, got into my car, and followed him across town to Vinnie's.

McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, Roy Rogers and Arby's all have their place in my life (I am a dedicated hamburger hound), but Vinnie's booths have high walls blackened with years of initials—dark, quiet corners where you can sit in peace for hours.

“So,” said Michael, “tell me about blue-green algae.”

“It's not exciting. We've got six varieties of blue-green algae in a water solution and we inoculate the soil around the corn, testing for the best fertilizer. The real problem is keeping the algae alive. I'm working on various nutrients to add to the water solution. Karen de Forio is changing the algae types and Lisa Schmidt is monitoring the other variables, like sun and heat. We're going to exhibit at the state Science Fair this winter.”

“You like laboratory research?”

“Not really. I liked coming up with the theory, and I liked figuring out how to approach it, but I can't say I actually like doing it.”

“Same as Toybrary,” said Michael.

I stared at him. “How do you know I don't enjoy Toybrary?”

“Just a guess. You were wonderful with Katurah, but somehow I don't see you happily on your hands and knees playing with little kids.”

He had thought about me. Tried to analyze me.

He changed the subject to one clearly dearer to his heart than Toybrary. His basement. Cellars do not interest me, but Michael's was full of his electronic equipment, from Betamax to police scanner, from microcomputer to electronic keyboard. There was no way I was going to interrupt our first date together by saying that cellars and electronics bored me equally, so I said things like, “Oh, I'd love to see that” and “Oh, Michael, you have to demonstrate that for me.”

He even told me about his father's remarriage. “It surprised me,” said Michael. “Dad was so crushed when Mom divorced him. He said he'd never have a woman in his life again. And there he was, six months later, beaming, laughing, his arm around Judith, phoning the church to set up the wedding.”

“What did you think about it?” I said.

He shrugged. “It was hard to have any opinion at all. It never happened to me before. All of a sudden, there we were. This entirely different family, occupying different rooms, having to get along.”

We talked about Judith and Katurah and his father. His mother seemed very shadowy. It gave me a quiver to talk about divorce, as though just talking about it could make it happen in my own family. My parents? My brother Ben and his wife, Lynn? I changed the subject almost superstitiously and told Michael about Coventry Road and the meadow path that wound among the grape vines and the bittersweet tangles.

“Very poetic,” he said. “If it had snow on it, I might ski on the path, but woods have no appeal for me otherwise.”

Well, so much for that, I thought, mentally crossing it off my list of possibilities. I tried not to think about skiing. My coordination reaches its limits with walking. Besides, I can't afford skiing. The trouble with so many activities is they cost so much. When Ben wanted to have a sailboat, that was it; they couldn't afford anything else. It was a good thing Lynn was willing to take up boating too.

“Tell me about your family,” said Michael.

“Ordinary,” I said, but that was not my opinion at all. I thought my family was wonderful and interesting. I'm backing off, I thought. This is our first date. I can't start out by hiding myself. That's no way to be a couple, faking things.

“Impossible,” said Michael. “I saw you on the Good Morning Show talking about Toybrary, and you were extraordinary. You were wearing some blue shirt and asking for donations of unusual toys. I made up my mind right then I wanted to get to know you.”

Michael had not come into the library to show Katurah how Toybrary worked. He had brought Katurah for an excuse. To meet
me.

For this boy, I thought, staring at his soft dark hair and his bright eager eyes—eager because of me—for this boy, I believe I could learn to love electronics and skiing.

It was impossible to pay attention during dinner that night. I was far too wrapped up in my thoughts of Michael and me.

My brother, Benjamin, and his wife, Lynn, were over. Ordinarily I love their company. I like to hold my nephew Jake (though it seems to me that parents who spent nine months thinking up names could do better than
Jake).
And I like having coffee afterward. Dad and Ben can't bear sitting at the table after the eating is done, so Mom and Lynn and I sit there for hours. Sometimes Mom talks about work, and Lynn talks about missing work, and Mom talks about childbirth and Lynn talks about sailing.

Lynn didn't even know what a sailboat was before she married Ben. Actually, she was afraid of the water. But Ben's interests pretty much center around boats, navigation and weather. So, before long, Lynn's did too. She adopted Ben's hobbies the way other couples adopt children.

Lynn had brought a hot casserole, and we were eating in the dining room for a change. There's an aesthetic pleasure to that room the other rooms lack. Several years ago, Mom joined Needle N Thread, which meets the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. Each year the club does a different kind of needlework together. The first year was crewel embroidery, so our dining-room curtains have a Jacobean flavor. The next year, needlepoint, so all eight chairs have magnificent cushions, three of which Mom designed herself. The year after that was knit lace. The ecru tablecloth looks like something a Colonial governor's wife might have.