I Don't Have a Happy Place (7 page)

A Lot of Living to Do

• • • • • •

I
was alone by the chain-link fence when the man crossed the street. He wore a tweed newsboy cap, faded jeans, and a trench coat that reminded me of the green guy on
Sesame Street
who wanted Ernie to buy an 8. The rest of the fourth graders were skipping rope or pelting balls at each other until someone cried, and I was busy singing the entire score of
Bye Bye Birdie
, alone. The man walked over to me, stopping on the other side of the metal diamond-patterned fence we sometimes got our lips stuck to in winter. He didn't say hello, just looked at me and stuffed his fat hands into the front pockets of his Wranglers.

“XYZ,” I said, giving him the once-over.

“What?” he said.

“XYZ,” I said again, directing my eyes to his lower half.

“What?”

Didn't this guy ever go to summer camp or have recess? Was he retarded?
XYZ
,
ABC gum, A-D-I-D-A-S
—these were kid codes and some of our best. Clearly he'd been a child at some point. How did he not know what I was talking about? I exaggerated my speech, going real slow so he could follow.

“X. Y. Z.” His blank face was starting to annoy me.

While waiting for him to catch on, I shielded him from the other kids on the playground and also from Madame Bray, who was on recess duty and very well might have been one of the bad guys from
Scooby-Doo
. Recess had just started and I had all the time in the world to wait for this turkey to crack the code and zip up his fly. He stared at me and I sent ESP toward his zipper and, finally, after I'd pretty much spelled it out for him, his eyebrows jumped up, and he said, “Oh! You mean this?,” to which I muttered, “No, doy—what took you so long?”

His eyes stayed on mine as he fiddled with his zipper. The whole affair should have taken seconds but he fished and troweled down there with real concentration, like he'd lost his keys or something. A swift nod of his head signaled that he was all set so I nodded my own head to double-check that he'd finally zipped his fly, only to see that he'd pulled
out
what was supposed to be tucked
in
. There it was, drooping out of his pants, thick and pink and a little floppy, like those Jewish salamis Zaida Max sometimes brought over from the Snowden Deli. He grinned. My ankles tingled. I shuffled back a few feet. He didn't make a move and I held my breath. Silence hung in the air like his naked wiener. And then he ran off.

He was halfway down the block when I heard a deep voice behind me.

“What are you doing?” It was Anne Irene Pasquale. A pint-sizer with rodent eyes and a mother who I was convinced was the inspiration for all those V. C. Andrews books girls read at camp. Mrs. Pasquale once made me eat fettuccine Alfredo with a glass of milk—both of which she said I asked for, both of which I despised—so I cried but finished what was in front of me anyway, worried she'd lock me in a closet.

“Well, why are you just standing here? We're skipping.”

I followed her pointing finger to the group of French girls, their pink rubber rope snapping the ground.

“It's okay,” I said. “I'm gonna stay here.”

“Too good for us?” said another girl, who'd marched over to collect Anne Irene Pasquale.

“No,” I said, trying to sound like a hellion.

Nathalie Tremblay put her arm around Anne Irene Pasquale, as if she were her property. “Come on, Anne. Let's go.”

There were only a handful of English-speaking girls at Collège International Marie de France, the French private school I'd attended since kindergarten, an institution known for its challenging academic programs and educators who hailed from France, thereby teaching us Parisian and not French-Canadian French. The leaflet boasted children of all ethnic diversities and claimed to be nondenominational and open to speakers of all languages. Loosely translated, that meant 99 percent white Catholic French kids and one lonely suburban Jew who was forced to sit outside of catechism class on a bench, and who would get flashed by a perv during recess.

Suffice it to say, the French speakers hung around with their kind on one side of the playground, leaving the bilinguals, who spoke English only when they felt like it, on the other. I rarely understood what was going on and waited for pity or translation and the occasional invitation to play. Bilinguals who spoke to me were hard to come by and I was not prepared to let Anne Irene Pasquale go, even if her mother made me eat cream-based sauces.

“She doesn't have to go, you know,” I said. “It's a free country.”

I had no idea if Canada really was a free country, since I barely understood French and couldn't follow a thing in geography class. But I'd once heard it on TV so I thought I'd bench-test it. Nathalie Tremblay didn't care what I said. She crossed her
arms and stared me down. Taller than all the fourth graders, she was rumored to wear Tickle deodorant. Her bangs were curled under and the braids that fell over each shoulder were neat and tidy, like two Marathon bars fresh out of the wrapper.

My insides were still buzzy from the wiener incident, flipping a ruffian switch I didn't even know I'd come assembled with. Gathering strength in my weak ankles, I kicked Nathalie Tremblay with my Frye boot. This was not Nathalie Tremblay's first time in the ring, because she had maneuvers. As I hurled my leg toward her, she grabbed the stacked heel of my boot, biting her bottom lip with the enormous teeth that made her look like a beautiful rabbit. She held on. I tried digging the heel of my other boot into the ground but I was no match for my opponent. It took a good three seconds for me to lose my balance, falling hard onto the cement, bringing Nathalie Tremblay down with me. Anne Irene Pasquale took off in a panic either to tell or to hide, leaving us in a heap by the hopscotch court. We sized up the passing clouds for a few minutes, still tangled in our fall.

“I like your boots,” Nathalie Tremblay said.

“I really like your teeth.”

•   •   •

Stepping into Nathalie Tremblay's house was like crossing the border into a foreign land, a dark little country decorated with mismatched furniture and chintz drapery. A small black upright piano took over most of the living room. There were a few houseplants and I noticed a green plastic watering can left on the rug. I thought of the young blond guy with the bowl haircut who showed up every Thursday with his own special watering cans to take care of our indoor potted plants. Peter Plant, I called him, but to everyone else, he was the Plant Guy. Our house had a lot of “guys.” We even had a live-in Filipina housekeeper who slept
in the basement. Riza was in charge of operations around our cramped three-bedroom house, calling my parents ma'am and sir and ironing underwear.

Nathalie's mother liked me to call her Mrs. Tremblay, which soothed me because there was never any question who the adult was. She had just come in from their square of a backyard, bringing sprigs she had cut from the lilac tree and placing them in a glass vase on the kitchen table, which made the whole inside of the house smell like we were outside. Mrs. Tremblay did the laundry, carrying a small plastic basket around from room to room with folded clothes for all three kids to put away. Mostly they threw the items at the back of the closet and she never said a word. She went to the grocery store, with coupons and a neat list.

After school, Mrs. Tremblay held on to her strand of pearls, her only decoration, as she leaned against the kitchen sink listening to our news of the day. I took in her plain skirt and cardigan. She looked like a television mother and I wanted to hug her.

“Thanks for the cookies, Mom,” said Nathalie Tremblay, finishing her milk and Fudge Stripes. Mrs. Tremblay had poured a glass for her daughter from a large aqua Tupperware pitcher, and inside the vessel was a plastic bag of milk. Nathalie told me her brother drank a lot of milk and, when her mother opened the fridge door, I saw at least four backup pouches on the top shelf, like IV bags fat with dairy instead of medicine or blood. Never in my ten years had I seen such a lineup of the stuff. Jews rarely drank milk as a beverage, not because it was against our religion but more because we collectively just thought it was gross. In our house we had Diet Pepsi, and Ace only drank 7 Up. I wanted nothing to do with milk but I was obsessed by those sacks of it.

“Let's go upstairs,” Nathalie said.

The second floor of the Tremblay house was even better than the first. All the beds looked like they'd had other lives, maybe at their grandparents' house or a distant cousin's in war-torn Europe, and my favorite part: nothing matched. The hallway floor was hardwood scattered with area rugs, and two of the four bedrooms had wall to wall. The windows were open and a breeze swirled in.

We had never opened a window in my house because they were painted shut. I spent many nights in bed thinking up complicated egress plans should a radiator suddenly explode and attempt to burn the place down. My parents didn't seem to mind the lack of fresh air, as it didn't interfere with the year-round use of the central air conditioning system. Meat-locker-temperature air pumped through the house, blasting from white holes in the floors and ceilings.

But the real showstopper at the Tremblay house arrived every night at 5:30 p.m. Mr. Tremblay was a giant, bearded and menacing like some beastly version of the guy on
The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams
. Nathalie's father taught clarinet in the public schools by day and sold lumber for firewood after hours. He had a red pickup truck with his name painted on the side. Every night, he'd stomp into the house with his oversized half-unlaced work boots tracking bits of mud all over the floor, the likes of which would have given my own father a heart attack.

I thought of my father returning home from a day of making ladies' blouses. Hanging up his suit on color-coded hangers, slipping on his pressed denims, the Yorkshire terrier snuggled at his feet as they fell into a deep snooze to the background sounds of
Barney Miller
. Sometimes I'd watch him sleep. The rise and fall of his Car­tier necklace, the naturally curly hair that was also permed poufing like a cloud around his head, the snug-fitting jeans he'd assured me were the ones real cowboys wore and were also “very in.”

When Mr. Tremblay returned from his day, he'd stagger around for a few moments, crash into furniture, then yell at it. Nathalie told me that one night a few weeks earlier she'd had to call the operator because her father was all liquored up and swung a small machete at his wife's neck. It was the wild, wild west at the Tremblays'. I wanted to stay forever.

I don't think Mrs. Grizzly Adams found the comings and goings of her house as glamorous as I did, because with each visit her nerves seemed more frazzled. She grasped her pearls tighter, and I noticed her hands shaking as she poured the milk. Mrs. Tremblay may not have appreciated what she had, but I was stinking jealous that Nathalie got to call the actual police when her father nearly sliced open her mother before her eyes. Who knew this stuff even happened outside the hum of the television droning from my parents' room—that there were men out there who whipped out their privates, that husbands brandished real live swords in attempts to slit their wives' throats. Currents of danger and sizzle never breezed through our sealed windows. And how did Nathalie even know what to do? I didn't know how to turn the oven on.

I decided then and there that I never wanted Nathalie to come over to my place because all we'd do there was listen to records on my hi-fi and watch the Yorkie hump his Charlie Brown towel that everyone called his girlfriend. Or my father would tell her that dumb story about how during Ace's Hockey Night in Canada–themed bar mitzvah, he forced me to pop out of a cake. Worse, she'd find out about the deal he was trying to broker with me, the one about how he'd absolutely get a nose job but only if I got one, too.

How could I bring Nathalie over for any of that? Yes, my father was well-meaning, everyone liked him; you couldn't help it. He was kind and golden retrieverish and he often carried Freshen Up
gum in his purse. He drove my brother to early morning hockey practice and walked the dog down the driveway to pee because my mother wasn't outdoorsy. You never even saw his skin crawl when his father came over to see the new car and Zaida Max called him a big shot, which he said through a smile, and Nana Esther sighed, assuring him the car was beautiful. Yes, my dad was all right. But, if we're being honest, it was a goddamn bummer that there would be no situation in which my father would pull a knife on any of us. There was nothing going on at my house, ever. The only action we saw took place on
Quincy.

It was all fun all the time at the Tremblays', and on the rare occasion that we'd find ourselves with nothing to do, I'd bring up her father, hoping to hear the latest installment of doom. She was always pissed about him and we spent a good deal of our after-school hours holed up in her room, eating Fudge Stripes and hatching plots of murder and revenge. Here, finally, I had something to add, since I'd clocked many hours in front of
Guiding Light
and knew all about how to get back at people.

“We should slash my dad's tires,” Nathalie said, biting the chocolate backing of the cookie with her sparkly beaver teeth. “Or put thumbtacks on the driveway.”

“One time at summer camp, they put Saran Wrap over the toilet,” I said, hoping to keep our nefarious activities indoors; I was scared to be outside at night.

“We could poison him. Like put Drano in his beer.”

“We could leave something at the top of the stairs that he could trip on,” I said. “He could fall down the stairs and get amnesia.”

“That would be loud,” she said, and we paused to imagine her ginormous father plummeting down the stairs. “No! I got it.”