Getting Over Jack Wagner (6 page)

“Fine,” I give in. “Here it is.”

She looks up, takes a sip.

“We went to Karl's mother's house today, to pick up some stuff, and while we were there she started, like, ferreting through his facial hair.”

“Ferreting through his facial hair?”

“She was kind of picking at him. Preening him. It reminded me of a ferret.”

“Ferrets are very underrated pets.”

“Well, this one wasn't. This was a mother ferret attaching herself to a twenty-seven-year-old man ferret. It was not okay.” I take another gulp of coffee, feeling emboldened. “But the ferreting wasn't the worst of it.”

“What was?”

“Just…Karl. The way he just sat there while she did it, like it was totally and completely normal. The thing is, for him, it probably is.” I take another burning swallow. “God. I don't know.”

Hannah laces her fingers around her teacup. Then she closes her eyes to think. Never in my life would I be caught in public closing my eyes to think; I feel vulnerable when I sneeze while driving. But Hannah is less worried about the external world, more attuned to her inner rhythms. It's the reason she doesn't eat meat, isn't afraid to talk about her feelings, always knows exactly when her period is coming. It's the reason she dates men who call her “sweetheart” while I run from men because of their taste in swimwear, the reason she finds herself in long-term relationships and my longest commitment to date was to Jack Wagner. The reason she will one day make a wonderful counselor, and I an efficient bean counter or bricklayer.

“So,” she says, opening her eyes. “You're breaking up with him, I guess.”

At this stage, my reputation precedes me. “I don't know. Yeah. Probably.” I stare at the top of my coffee: flat, black, sinister as a poker chip. “I think he might already see it coming.”

Hannah nods, but I know she isn't close to finished. She swallows and lowers her cup, spilling some pinkish tea onto the saucer. When she speaks again, it's her therapist voice: a long, slow string of ellipses. “I know I'm repeating myself, Eliza, but…have you given any more thought to the possibility that…you're attracted to guys who won't stick…because of your father?”

And there you have it. Exactly the kind of insight I crave but hate. The advice I want but don't. It doesn't take a genius to make the distant father/elusive rock star connection, but for some reason I need Hannah to keep reasserting it. It's times like these when having a best friend studying to be a psychiatrist is both handy and terrifying. Obviously, I'm looking for feedback when I call her, especially when I'm fresh from a “moment,” especially when I agree to meet her at the Generous Garden. Because, deep down, I really do want to understand myself. I'm just not crazy about the process of doing it. It's kind of like eating vegetables. Balancing my checkbook. Going to the gym. Going to college. Probably, in the end, it will have been worth it.

Hannah blows on her tea, sending tiny ripples across the surface. “I mean, on some level, you might be worried you'll end up like your mother did…when your father left.”

I nod, sort of. It's tough to argue these points with Hannah, considering she was there. She witnessed my parents fighting and my mother numbing over. It was her sunporch that became my surrogate bedroom, her family that I adopted as my own. It was she who was watching TV with me the night I burst into tears over the injustice of
My Two Dads.

“Maybe you're taking steps to prevent what happened to your mother from happening to you. Like avoiding relationships that involve any risk…or depth. True depth.” She says this kindly, but the extra emphasis is not lost on me: that the kind of “deep” I date is actually shallow as a puddle.

I feel myself growing defensive again.

“I mean, by looking for this perfect musician,” Hannah goes on, “you can pretty much guarantee you're not going to find him. So relationships will never get that serious…or require a real commitment.” She pushes a damp curl off her forehead. “After all, commitment is scary.”

I know, on some level, Hannah is making sense here. Still, I lurch back with a clumsy, “So you're saying my mother is scary? Is that it?” which isn't relevant and isn't even believable, since my mother is the last person I would rush to defend. It also isn't spoken at the required whisper, which prompts the woman at the next table to look up, frowning, from
Feeding the Inner You.
Even the Gregorians sound annoyed.

“Sorry,” I say.

Hannah nods, understanding. Too much self-assessment at once is like drinking a can of soda too fast; it can make you feel oversaturated. Overmemoried. I find myself recalling what my house felt like in the weeks after my father left: the blaze of light from the TV, the black rotary phone I begged to ring, the ragged green recliner hulking by the curb. In truth, it wasn't my dad I really missed; he'd been so distant, there wasn't much
to
miss. What I missed was me—the kid I used to be. A normal kid. A kid with two parents and a sibling. A kid whose biggest worries were figuring out her locker combination and convincing her mother to buy her Guess jeans. A kid with every piece of her family, if not happy or healthy, at least intact.

“Maybe we could talk about something else?” I say. Of course, by shifting the conversation to Hannah's court, I know what I'm setting myself up for. There is only one topic that could present itself next.

“Well, Alan and I are planning a trip to the Amish country.”

Bingo.

According to the textbooks, Hannah's relationship with Alan Pinkerton is the picture of mental health. Unlike the rock star wannabes I date, Alan Pinkerton is a grown-up. He has a full beard. He wears bedroom slippers. He is a psychology student, like Hannah, though he's been at Penn a year longer than she has. They met when Hannah entered the program two falls ago, after she got back from London. For Alan, either the proximity of academia or the proximity of Hannah's year in London seems to have entitled him to be part British. He says “post” instead of mail, “cheers” instead of see ya. He calls me “e-LI-za,” with a mournful note on the second syllable, like some trying-to-be brogue.

On the outside, I smile at Alan politely. On the inside, I am screaming:
You're from Newark, for fuck's sake!

The funny thing is, I think Alan recalls Hannah's London experience more fondly than she does. For her, it was the “transitional year,” the “growing year,” the year when all the inclinations she'd been born with—an obsession with animals, a talent for listening—hardened into diets and stances and careers. She worked at a food co-op, where she fell in love with a lad named Reuben and, soon after, moved into his flat, which had a great view and a sturdy teakettle and a window ledge where pigeons came for muesli in the mornings.

I learned all about Hannah's life via postcards—“On my way to Spain!” or “Recipe for Pudding (easy)” or “Think I'm falling in love!”—while I moped around post-college Philly, dating the bassist from Roller Toaster and plastering my freezer door with stoic Royal Guards and Big Bens. I resented Hannah, though I didn't like to admit it. I resented her willingness to take risks. To travel abroad, to give up chicken, even to fall in love. To do all the things I didn't dare. Although I told myself frequenting The Blue Room was living on the edge, all the risk in my life truly began and ended with the nipple ring on my Roller Toaster.

But in December, the Big Bens stopped coming. Reuben had left Hannah. Reuben had left London. And for three weeks, Hannah didn't get out of bed. In March, Mrs. Devine flew to London and came back with Hannah, who started applying to med school for psychiatry.

“I want to go horseback riding,” Hannah is saying now. “And Alan will insist on trying all the native Amish foods.”

“What are native Amish foods?”

“Oh, you know. Apple dumplings. Shoo fly pie.”

“Shoo fly pie?” I say, feigning shock. The
Inner You
woman lifts her head and sighs. “That sounds violent. Isn't killing flies required?”

Hannah flashes me a sly smile. “I guess you'll never be stopping by the Amish country, Eliza. No rock stars allowed.”

I grin. She grins back. Any dry wit Hannah has acquired over the years I take partial credit for. Likewise, any emotional maturity I've achieved I owe in part to her. We are more different now than we were as kids, but that's the way old friends work, I think. With new friends, what you have in common is more circumstantial: colleges, jobs, hobbies, acquaintances-of-the-hour. What old friends share goes deeper than that. Your lives can branch off in completely different directions, but always, you share that knot of a past—heartbreaks and sleep-overs and screened-in porches—and the raw, peculiar memory of yourself which, in part, belongs to them.

 

Phone message from Andrew: “What up, G? What going down?”

This is unfortunate. Andrew's attempts at hip lingo fall into the same embarrassing category as his attempts at air guitaring. I've noticed that he seems to be practicing both more frequently lately, especially when something grown-up happens in his life—investing in a new stock, trying a new vegetable—in an effort to convince himself he's still carefree and childlike.

“Anyway, it's me,” he says. “Got your message. Give me a buzz.”

Andrew's message clicks off and the automated answering machine man comes on: “No. More. Messages.” Like I need this guy rubbing it in. Sometimes I have visions of the automated answering machine man trying his best to maintain a monotone, while laughing into his sleeve between messages and stuffing his mouth with pork rinds. One day he'll just come out and bark something like: “Same. Old. Messages. Loser. Get. New. Friends.”

I go into the west corner/bedroom and crawl into my PJs. It's almost a quarter past nine. It's too quiet. No phone ringing. No TV rambling. The Piano Man seems to have packed it in. Karl didn't call, obviously. Should I feel disappointed? No. Do I? Not really. Not specifically. Not justly, anyway. After all, I'm the one who said I needed to unwind. I return to the living room, turn on VH1—an intimate
Behind the Music;
tonight, the Fleetwood Mac story—and dial Andrew.

“Hey, Eliza,” he answers, before I can speak.

Andrew's ability to identify my phone calls freaked me out for exactly two days last October. I went through the phases of a) Andrew as impressive, b) Andrew as spooky, c) Andrew as genuinely clairvoyant, and d) Andrew and I as psychically connected and possibly destined to be soulmates after all, before I realized he'd just gotten Caller ID.

“I know you can ID me, Andrew. You don't have to keep proving it.”

“But it's fun.”

“You're right. It's a ball.” I settle deeper into the couch, pulling an afghan over my knees. “What are you watching?” This is our standard greeting, and a quick test of the other's state of mind.

“X-Files.
You?”

“Behind the Music.”
Both of these sound fairly healthy.

“What's the musical story tonight?” Andrew says. “Drugs? Divorce? Bankruptcy?”

“I don't know yet. I just turned it on.”

“Right.” I hear him pop something in his mouth and crunch. Probably Cracker Jacks. “So, did you go out with Bon Jovi today?”

“Actually, I might have almost finished with Bon Jovi today.”

“Oh yeah? How come?” I can hear him smiling as he waits for my reason. “Does he have a pet bug? Sing badly in the shower? Say ‘idear' instead of ‘idea'?”

This is one of the downsides to having best friends. You become too obvious.

“We went to his mother's house.”

“Oooohhh!” Andrew says, sucking in his breath like a crowd watching a goal graze the net and just miss. “The fatal Eliza-mother move. Which did she break out first? Photos or live action film?”

“Neither. It was worse. She was kind of, ferreting in his facial hair.”

“Ferreting in his facial hair?” The smile audibly disappears. “What the hell does ferreting mean? That's not a word.”

“It is a word. I should know. I do words for a living.”

“It is not.”

“It is.”

“Hold on. I have a dictionary right here.” It's true, he does. I can see it lined up next to his phone along with his thesaurus, phone book, zip code directory, and eighty-dollar art history textbook he bought in college, never opened, but refused to sell back because (his story) he might want to refresh himself on the material in the future or (my story) he wanted to keep the pictures of naked women.

“Here it is.” I hear him flipping pages, mumbling to himself. This is hitting Andrew where he lives: the practical, provable world. “F. Ferret. Noun. Mammal. Fur. Feet.” I hear him pause, then snap, “Fuck.”

“Told you,” I say. “Ferreting.” As if sensing the presence of foreign animals, Leroy saunters by with his tail in the air. I start patting my lap like a maniac. He glances at me with disdain. “Anyway. Like I was saying…”