Love and Other Four-Letter Words (2 page)

S
o that's why, barely seven hours after I finished my biology Regents, when I should have been celebrating the end of tenth grade, I was dividing my worldly possessions into piles to bring, piles to store in the garage and piles of maybes, unfortunately the biggest pile of all.

It's not like I forfeited these fantastic plans to stay home tonight. Kitty and I usually spend the last day of school renting movies and bingeing on frozen yogurt, but she and Jack were headed to some party. Even if I didn't have to pack, I doubt I would have joined them. Jack, who's a forward on the varsity basketball team, runs with the Beautiful People. It's not as if Jack himself is that beautiful—his face is sort of mashed in, like
he smacked into a brick wall at a high speed—but being a Beautiful Person is not so much about looks as attitude. I should know. During the handful of parties Jack has taken us to, I've had an abundance of time to record mental notes because, other than minor details, they all went exactly like this:

1. We arrive. I suddenly remember that after the last party, I vowed never to attend another as long as I live.
   

2. Jack gets swept up in a flurry of high fives and back slaps. Kitty, surgically attached to his J. Crew shirt, disappears into a cloud of cigarette smoke.
   

3. I scan for familiar faces, maybe receive a limp wave from the girl who scammed answers off me in geometry last week. Someone hands me a warm beer in an oversized plastic cup. I sip slowly, hating the taste of beer but wondering if a slight buzz could transform me into the life of the party. Very doubtful. Search for a dark corner.
   

4. Eventually found by Kitty, who is distraught and in desperate need of counsel because: a. some bitch is flirting with Jack, and while he's not reciprocating he's also not ignoring.
   OR
   

   b. Jack is flirting with some bitch. Well, not flirting exactly, but he just asked her if she was on the cover of last month's
   Cosmo.
   

5. Once Kitty flits off to find Jack again, I consider why no one of the male gender is entering my dark corner of the world. Wonder if I'm:
   

   a. sexually repulsive.
   

   b. in deficiency of pheromones, which is this scent that animals emit to attract a mate.
   

   c. invisible.
   

6. We leave by midnight. I vow never to attend another party as long as I live.
   

By ten P.M., the radio was tuned to WICB, the Station for Innovation, and I was loading my books into a cardboard box. Mom had said it would be fine to stack them on the top shelves, but the last thing I wanted was to have the Oscar Mayer Wieners snooping through my personal belongings. Especially if they came across the racy Harlequin Romances that Kitty gave me in seventh grade, key sections highlighted.

I must have been in my own world because the next thing I knew, Mom was standing in the doorway, wearing paint-splattered overalls with a lacy black camisole
underneath. A paisley bandanna was holding back her long blackish hair.

“Thanks for knocking.” My door had been closed, but not locked, because it's an iron rule in our house to do the standard three-rap before you enter a room.

“I was … for about ten minutes. You've got to turn down that music, Sammie. I can barely hear myself think.”

My full name is Samantha Leigh Davis, but ever since I was a baby everyone has called me Sammie. Several times, I've asked my parents if it was their idea of a joke to give their only child the same name as Sammy Davis, Jr., one of the ensemble of 1950s entertainers called the Rat Pack.

We named you after Mom's father, Samuel, who died when she was thirteen,
Dad usually says.

And, frankly,
Mom always adds,
Sammy Davis, Jr., didn't dawn on us when we started calling you Sammie.

Didn't dawn on her! Just like it's not dawning on her now to give me more than a millisecond to get to my stereo? Before I'd been able to set down my armful of paperbacks, Mom tromped across the room and lowered the volume to a barely audible pitch.

“You could've let me turn it down myself,” I said. “Don't use that tone of voice with me.”

Tone of voice is a biggie in Mom's lexicon. I admit, I
wouldn't have won any Pollyanna awards recently. But these last few weeks, Mom's been so sensitive that if I allow the faintest hint of emotion to enter my voice, she careens across the room.

I folded my arms across my chest and faced Mom. We stared at each other for a few seconds, like gunslingers in an Old West showdown. That's when I noticed the purple half circles under her eyes. Without them, Mom would look about twenty-five, not fortytwo, which she actually is. Every once in a while, people ask if we're sisters. I never know if they're being sincere, because we don't look that much alike, except we're both around five feet five and have brown eyes. I wish I'd gotten Dad's eyes, which are hazel with rusty flecks that appear almost orange if he wears a certain color shirt.

I did inherit Dad's straight brown hair, which I've kept right below my shoulders for practically my whole life. There's nothing else to do with it. For a while, in junior high, I attempted styling it with various products pawned off on me by overly optimistic hairdressers. But it never made a difference, except to make me look like I'd had a run-in with a jar of rubber cement. Eventually I gave up and resigned myself to my fate: to be absolutely, completely average.

Mom finally broke the silence.

“Look, I'm driving down to the A&P to get more boxes,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you'd like anything.”

“I don't think you could get what I want at the A&P.” Mom ignored that comment. “Some Ben & Jerry's or a Frozfruit?”

I shook my head. A lump was lodging in my esophagus.

“The more you resist this change, the harder it's going to be,” Mom said.

I didn't want her to see that I was struggling to catch my breath, so I turned toward my bookshelf and surveyed the stack of remaining paperbacks. I wasn't in the mood for homilies tonight.

“Time moves like a river,’ Mom continued, quoting the John Stewart song Dad used to listen to when he was feeling melancholy, ‘you can either sink or swim.’

And that's what got me. I pivoted around, sucking in a pathetic gasp of air. “Please tell me the next time you're giving an inspirational seminar, because I'll remember to sign up.”

“Have it your way,” Mom snapped, starting down the hallway. But when she reached the stairs, she spun on her heel. “Just make sure you finish your room. The
movers are coming at noon and anything we don't send with them gets stored in the garage.”

I almost yelled back,
What does it look like I'm doing?
But instead I reached over and blasted the volume on my stereo again.

People think it's strange when I tell them I am closer to Dad than Mom, as if the only things fathers are good for are briefing you on current events or lubing your bike chain. It's not even that Dad and I chat the way I do with Kitty, it's more that we like to do the same things. Or I guess I should say
liked.
Up until last month we were always planning hikes or cycling into the farmland surrounding Ithaca. And ever since Christmas, when Dad gave me his old guitar from college, he'd been teaching me chords to folk songs. Kitty always teases me that I'm a hippiechick, which I don't even think is such a bad thing after all.

Sometimes I wonder if Mom resented our bond, if she felt like the odd person out in the Davis clan.
Resentment.
That's what Mom and Dad's last blowout was about, back in April, when they returned from a dinner party hosted by the dean of the Arts School. I'd gone up to bed already, so I'd only caught this sound bite:

Mom:
I can't stand the way everyone looks down their
noses at me, as if I show kids how to glue Popsicle sticks into birdcages for a living.

Dad:
Don't harbor resentment against Cornell for the way your life hasn't turned out, Roz … or against me, for that matter.

Mom:
Well, if it weren't for Cornell, or you, for that matter, I wouldn't be stuck in this godforsaken town.

I'd be the first to agree that Mom doesn't mesh with Ithaca. Take last year's holiday chorus recital. All the other parents wore jeans and coats, with the occasional red and green sweater. But Mom arrived in a purple velvet cape and glittery silver leggings that hugged her curvaceous hips. I'd gotten an earlier ride from the soprano who lives two doors down, so I almost keeled over when I spotted her. And then, during the final number, they invited the audience to join in on “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” Instead of mouthing the words like all the other parents, Mom let her voice echo through the auditorium (
And let it begin with meeeeee …
) so loudly I wanted to crawl under the risers.

I guess that's the biggest difference between Mom and me. Where I'm more at ease being a chameleon, Mom thinks idiosyncrasies are what make a person interesting. At least that's what she said on the first day of eighth grade, when I wound up in her art class.
Rule #1,
she'd scribbled on the chalkboard:
Call me Roz. Mrs. Davis is my mother-in-law.
Once the initial astonishment had rippled through the classroom, she'd selected a fresh piece of phlegm-colored chalk and written,
Rule #2: The only rule in art is that there are no rules.

After the bell rang, as we were filing into the hallway, a chorus of classmates fed me that
your-mom-is-so-coolI-bet-you-can-get-away-with-murder
line. I just shrugged and shifted my notebooks onto my hip. I didn't tell them about the day before, when I'd returned from Buttermilk Falls only to hear the Doors reverberating through the cul-de-sac, originating from our house. Nor did I say how uneasy it had made me to discover Mom grooving around the family room to “Light My Fire,” shaking her boobs as if she were some Vegas showgirl. Nor did I say that since I wasn't forecasting homicide in my future, all I wanted was a gardenvariety mom like Kitty's. Mrs. Lundquist lived in freshly pressed blouses and slacks, muted tones only, and was constantly dashing out to town board meetings.

As I dragged a box of books over to the doorway, I switched on my fan. It was warm and muggy out, a typical central New York early-summer night. Even though my windows were open, there wasn't the slightest hint of a breeze. The elastic from my bra felt sticky
against my skin. I reached under my T-shirt, unhooked the back, slipped an arm through the strap and pulled my bra out the other sleeve.

There's something I
did
inherit from Mom: big breasts. Not gigantic, but enough so they sag without an underwire bra. Enough so some jerk in gym class last year called me Grand Tetons, after those mountains in Wyoming. Enough so they make me appear heavier than I actually am. And I'm not even heavy, though next to Kitty, who is four inches taller and fourteen pounds lighter than me, I must look like a whale.

Curvy is what I'd call myself on a good day. On a bad day, I try not to look in the mirror. I'm probably about as insecure as the next girl, which is to say that I wish my thighs didn't splay out when I sit down or my stomach didn't look pregnant after a second helping. Or I could lose those awful, pinkish stretch marks that recently appeared on my hips. My pediatrician suggested vitamin E oil, which I rubbed on them religiously for two weeks. But then I missed a day, a week, and eventually I gave up altogether.

I should know better than to compare myself to Kitty. Besides the tall thing and the skinny thing and the blond thing, there's the guy thing. Even though she's been going out with Jack for five months, she's
still a natural-born flirt. Like she knows exactly how to shake her hips or twitter at guys' jokes, even if she's already heard them. I could never pull the giggling number off. I'd probably wind up sounding like a hyena with rabies. Besides, I'm well aware that guys didn't frequent our table in the snack bar because of
me.
It sounds awful, but if you saw a Jaguar and a Ford Taurus parked next to each other, which one would
you
want to drive?

The other thing about Kitty is that she's really smart. Like she and her parents are planning a road trip to Harvard and Yale this fall. Like we can cram for a test together and she'll ace it, bonus question included, and I'll walk away with a B-plus.
Exemplary
is how teachers always describe her. Just like they say I'm a
team player,
which I hate. Because I suck at organized sports, and anyway, it's just a euphemism for absolutely, completely average. Which is why I've always felt lucky someone like Kitty wants me for a best friend.