Not Exactly a Love Story (3 page)

I went to the dance, even though my heart wasn’t in it. This was
another dance I could’ve taken my girl to. If she hadn’t moved away. I know this sounds sappy as hell, but it’s the kind of thing that goes through your head when you’re taking the wrong girl to a dance.

She could dance, though. Because of those ballroom lessons, I’m some dancer myself, so I can tell you she was outstanding. She had probably devoted a lot of extra time to certain social graces in the hope of overcoming the acne lockout. I couldn’t help it that I wasn’t going to fall in love with her, but I knew I ought to like her more than I did.

Even though I spent a lot of time getting her sodas that she didn’t drink—they’re bad for your skin—she didn’t drift away to talk to anyone else.

Once, standing in the soda line, I said to the guy I
thought she liked, “I’ll bet she’d like for someone to dance with her. Besides me, I mean.”

“Yeah. But I’d never do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I hate when somebody comes up to my date and asks her to dance. I don’t need that. Besides,” he said, “she’s too good a dancer.”

It was downhill from there. She must’ve known I wasn’t having such a good time, although I was as nice as I could be. We left maybe twenty minutes or so before the dance was supposed to be over.

“Usually this DJ goes on for an extra half hour or so,” she said as I held her jacket for her.

“My mom asked me to be home a little early,” I said.

I started for the exit, wearing this winning expression that I hoped would encourage her to feel we were both happy to be going. I hoped that would do it, because I didn’t know if I could leave without her. She came along, sort of moving with the music, suggesting she still had a dance or two left in her.

“Hey, I think I knew somebody from your science club,” I said. But she didn’t know my girl very well. I think she was feeling mean when she said someone told her my girl had moved to Alaska.

She lived in one of those new high-rise buildings that boasts about half a dozen elevators. She said none were ever closer than the sixteenth floor. She only lived on the third floor and we’d do better taking the stairs.

On the second-floor landing, she complained about
something in her shoe. She slipped it off, leaning against my arm. She shook the shoe pretty good, but nothing fell out. “Do you feel anything?” she asked with a concerned frown, rubbing her finger over the innersole.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t bothered by any of this until I put my finger into her shoe. It was warm to the touch. I know it was only a shoe and of course it would be warm from her foot, but I didn’t expect it. It was very personal in an odd sort of way.

The thing is, she was hoping I’d kiss her while she was leaning against me. It stretches credulity, I know, that she would want me to touch her warm shoe and somehow make the leap to a kiss. But it was in the air.

Only I didn’t want to kiss her. Don’t get me wrong. I wanted a girl to be leaning against me in this silly suggestive way. But she was the wrong girl. I passed her shoe back without any fanfare. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

She looked like she was going to cry.

When we reached her door, I wanted to say something to help. Like,
I felt like that at the beginning of the evening. In fact, I still feel that way, but I can’t do a thing to help either one of us. We’re the wrong two people standing here, and we both feel just miserable about it
. But I couldn’t say that or anything else. Except that probably the junior class raked in a good penny to spend on the prom. Particularly at the soda line. Some line. And good night. And you’re some dancer yourself.

Really.

’Night.

If I had washed up on the shore after the dance, if the water had
slowly receded, I could have dried my feet and gone on, maybe only a little the worse for wear. But unlike the dance, the gym problem went on and on, rising like a tide.

Mom’s mood was excellent. Her horoscopes looked good lately. And she’d met another man. If he worked on Wall Street, I’d have understood it. But Mom and my gym teacher went to dinner one evening to discuss the possible reasons for my failure in gym class. Mr. B seemed sympathetic to our recent upheaval and open to discussion about my grade.

I worked harder at mastering gymnastics. They met again to discuss my sudden interest in gym class participation and yet again to celebrate my newfound powers on the parallel bars.

I’d had enough. Not only did I not understand why they
needed to get together so often, I just didn’t like it. Then Mom dropped the cover of talking about my grades. She was dating him. I stopped going to class.

Frankly, it was a matter of some embarrassment to me. Not that Mr. B told any of the students, and I certainly didn’t. But I didn’t like the twinkle in my guidance counselor’s eye when she asked me if I had anything new to report.

All through May and June, I shored myself up with the idea that I was only a few weeks from the end of the school year. Mom and Mr. B would forget about each other over the summer. Better yet, they could be over this little crush before then. I still didn’t like it.

I liked it less when, on the last day of school, he proposed marriage. My whole body went clammy cold and goose-bumped when Mom told me. “You’re kidding, right?”

A little smile turned up the corners of Mom’s mouth. “He’s a nice man, Vinnie.”

“You haven’t known him long enough to know how nice he is.” They’d been dating for three and a half months, tops.

“I think I have,” she said, almost coy. Definitely amused. “Really very nice. I think you’re overreacting.”

I’d had him for gym for four semesters.

“The man obsesses. He’s compulsively neat, he watches football games from behind a chewed-up cigar, he’s a coach!” Just so we get things straight here, he didn’t smoke the cigar, he chewed it. Clearly, he’d never looked at one of those anti–chewing tobacco posters in the bio lab down the hall
from the gym. The post-surgery victim of facial cancer before reconstructive work is begun. Very attractive.

Mom said, “He’s more up-to-date than you’d guess. His mother meditates. She wears Earth shoes.”

“You’ve met his mother?”

“Just for lunch.”

Mom always said she made her biggest business decisions over lunch. She had me worried.

She didn’t leap at Mr. B’s proposal, but she said she would give it serious consideration. She’d divorced Dad because she didn’t get to be a stay-at-home wife. Of course, now she was no longer a wife. One for Mr. B.

Dad called. I said, “Mom got a marriage proposal, Dad.”

Silence. Tense silence. Then, “I guess she must be feeling pretty good about that.”

Were they both reading manuals?

“I think it’s pretty fast, myself.”

“We’re divorced, Vinnie.”

“She still has a tan line where her wedding band used to be.” An exaggeration, but still.

“You can’t expect her not to see other men, Vinnie.”

“I can expect her not to be engaged before a decent period of mourning is over, can’t I?”

There was a telling silence. Then, “So, listen, how are your grades?”

“I flunked gym again.”

* * *

Mom continued to consider Mr. B’s proposal through a few more candlelit dinner dates that she bragged about to her divorced girlfriends. I reminded Mom that she’d promised the divorce would not infringe on my way of life. I pointed to my grades as an indicator of my vulnerability.

Then Mr. B got a job offer from a high school on Long Island. He told Mom he’d spent five years in Forest Hills trying and failing to start a football team and, as luck would have it, this school boasted a fine team that now needed a coach.

He told me the school also boasted a swim team.

Okay, I swim. Just passably, not at all well. I don’t really like swimming much. But what I said was,
I’m not exactly team material. I’m a loner
. It ticked Mom off that I said this, like I should want to pass the all-around good kid test or something.

She hadn’t accepted his proposal. At least, she hadn’t told me.

I think she let Mr. B take her house-hunting just to punish me. The trouble was, everything they looked at created in Mom a deep dissatisfaction with apartment living.

I got mugged on the way home from the dermatologist. I was in
the subway station, one of those underground mazes that run entrances over a three- or four-block span. At eight-thirty on a Monday evening, the nearest token window was unmanned and the station was all but deserted.

It wasn’t a friendly give-me-everything-but-one-subway-token-that-you’re-gonna-need mugging. He was too thin, like he hadn’t had enough to eat for years. And shaky. Not like he was afraid of getting caught, but like he suffered from a debilitating disease.

He had eyes of that icy transparent blue, hardly any color at all. He looked weirded out. He gestured with the knife. “This all you got?”

“Yes.” I knew I might be about to die. I felt a surge of
anger. I was a good eight or ten inches taller than the mugger. If it weren’t for the knife, I could’ve taken his money from him.

He stared at the money. “Twelve dollars and forty-six cents?”

“I’m fifteen. What kind of money do you think I carry around?”

“Don’t be a wise guy.” The point of his knife dug into the soft skin under my chin.

I said nothing. A thin warmth trickled down my neck.

When I was little, I had a trick I used for bad times with my parents or teachers—anybody. I pictured them as animals. Mom or Dad as a trumpeting elephant, teachers as bumbling bees, clucking chickens—you get the idea. I tried, but nothing I came up with was derogatory, invalidating, or even harmless. Everything that came to mind either scratched, bit, or squeezed until it held a boneless rag.

“Look, you got all my money.” My voice came out all quavery. “Why don’t you just go before someone comes along?”

Mistake.

“You in a rush, baby face?” He leaned in closer. I couldn’t get away from his breath. Like he’d been chewing crayons. Old, moldy crayons.

“I just think you’re taking an awful chance,” I whispered.

That’s when a cop came down the stairs. He was still half a block away. The mugger was younger and faster, and despite being an unhealthy-looking specimen, he vaulted
over the turnstile and ran for the lower level as I slid down the wall, my legs turned to rubber.

A train rumbled into the station, apparently on the other track, because the mugger came back up the stairs and ran down another flight before New York’s Finest had even let himself through the turnstile.

The thing is, all the time I was sitting there, I kept thinking of how I’d handed over my money without a qualm. I’d pleaded with him to leave me alone, I made out I was concerned for his welfare.

I hated myself for being scared. I knew I would spend weeks trying to think of the snappy rejoinders I’d have come up with if I’d known a cop was about to come down the stairs.

By then I was crying. The policeman made me lie down, showing me where to press my thumb beneath my chin to stop the bleeding while he tried to get help with a walkie-talkie. We drew a small crowd, people who’d gotten off the train the mugger boarded.

The weight of this incident tipped the scale to Mr. B.