Other Words for Love (6 page)

five

I
packed my overnight bag on Sunday morning. Pajamas, underwear, my migraine pills just in case. I was going to spend the day with Evelyn because Patrick was on duty again.

This was Mom and Patrick’s idea. But they pressured me to pretend that I had thought of it myself, because Evelyn would get suspicious otherwise. She needed my help, and they knew what was best for her.

They’d been talking about what was best for Evelyn since Shane was born. The two of them were constantly on the phone, which didn’t seem ironic to anyone but me. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten that Mom once despised Patrick and that she’d made a huge scene after Evelyn got in trouble. Mom had picked me up from school the day after she found out Evelyn was pregnant. She drove to Patrick’s firehouse and screamed and swore at him on the sidewalk. I watched from her car as she called him a lowlife and a scumbag, and I shrank down in my seat when she asked him if he’d ever heard of a condom.
You should think with your brain
, she had said.
It’s in your head, Patrick. Not in your pants
.

Now they were allies. A few times Dad mumbled something about how Mom shouldn’t get involved, it wasn’t right to meddle, but Mom didn’t listen. She said that Evelyn had two children, her nasty attitude might drive Patrick away, and a divorce would be catastrophic because Evelyn had no education or job skills.

“You have nothing to worry about, Nancy,” Dad told her as he drove us to Queens in Mom’s car that afternoon. The windows were open because it was warm for the second week of September, and Mom’s hair floated around her head in a frizzy swirl. “I think Patrick is very much in love with her.”

I thought so too. He had to be in love to put up with everything she dished out.

Mom didn’t seem convinced, because she made a disgusted face and breathed a stream of Pall Mall smoke through her nose like a bull. “Listen, Tom. I’ve never said anything about the weight she’s put on. I could stand to drop a few myself. But between that and Evelyn’s mood swings …” She shook her head, inhaled on her cigarette, and blew a gray cloud out the window. “My point is that she’s giving Patrick plenty of reasons to screw around.”

Dad glanced over at Mom, who was lifting her face to the breeze and enjoying her cigarette. I thought he might argue with her, but he didn’t. He never did. He just tuned the radio to the Yankee game. That was the only sound I heard until we rang Evelyn’s doorbell.

It was one of her good days. She stood in the foyer, wearing a sundress that minimized what was wrong and exaggerated what was right. The skirt elongated her legs, the belt slimmed her waist. A beaded necklace got lost in her cleavage. Her hair had been blow-dried smooth, and it framed her refined features and the rare color of her eyes.

She made lunch for us. Chips and dip in the living room, stuffed shells covered with Ragu baked in the oven, Mrs. Fields cookies served with Neapolitan ice cream on paper plates.

“I know you like all three flavors, Dad,” Evelyn said, running a scooper across the vanilla and the chocolate and the strawberry. She dropped a tricolored blob on his plate and sat down with Shane on her lap, and I wondered why Mom was so worried, because Evelyn seemed fine. She looked across the table at me and asked how school was going. “Any cute boys?” she said.

Mom was swallowing a spoonful of chocolate ice cream. “Boys are irrelevant,” she answered before I could open my mouth. “Ariadne is at Hollister so she can get into a good college and make something of her life.”

There was a clock over the sink and I heard it ticking. Mom went back to her ice cream and didn’t notice how much Evelyn’s face had changed—her jaw was stiff, her mouth tight. How could Mom be so clueless? College, making something of my life, everything Mom thought her firstborn daughter hadn’t done.
Boys are irrelevant
—that had been Mom’s favorite phrase when Evelyn was a teenager, and I knew what Mom was thinking: You didn’t listen to me, Evelyn. And look at where that got you. You’re an overweight twenty-three-year-old with a GED and two kids, sitting in an ugly kitchen that your husband can’t afford to remodel.

“I love your dress, Evelyn,” I blurted out, hoping a compliment would help, but it didn’t. She smiled dully, mumbled something about changing Shane’s diaper, and disappeared upstairs until it was time for Mom and Dad to leave.

“Don’t be a sourpuss,” Mom told her on the front steps. “Patrick will get sick of you.”

Then she and Dad were gone. Evelyn slammed the door, went to the refrigerator, and plopped on the couch with a beer bottle.

“Fucking unbelievable,” she said, prying off the cap. She took a swig and rested her feet on the coffee table. I just watched from the foyer. Sweet Evelyn had vanished as quickly as she’d appeared, and now I was afraid to go near my sister. “Don’t listen to what our dear mother tells you about boys, Ari,” she said, raising her middle finger to a photograph of Mom on the wall. It was a framed picture from Evelyn and Patrick’s wedding, and everyone was smiling. “She’d keep you in a cage if she could. Make you do everything
her
way.”

I stared at the picture. I remembered that it had been a sunny day. Mom had hemmed Evelyn’s dress the night before, and she had invited Patrick’s parents to sleep at our house because they couldn’t afford a hotel. She’d driven Evelyn to ten different florists to find the prettiest bouquet, and she’d relinquished a strand of pearls Dad had given her, so that Evelyn would have something old.

“Mom means well,” I said.

Evelyn laughed. “Are you aware that she wanted me to have an abortion when I was pregnant with Kieran?”

I was, but I shook my head anyway. I didn’t want Evelyn to know that I heard the conversation almost six years ago through the wall that separated my room from hers. She and Mom were yelling and Evelyn was crying, and Mom said that an abortion would be the best way to solve this mess. Then Evelyn could finish high school and go to college—even if it was just Kingsborough Community College or Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School—anything would be better than having a baby before she turned eighteen.

“What a Catholic,” Evelyn said. “Only goes to church on holidays and tells her daughter to kill a baby. She’s a hypocrite, you know.”

I didn’t agree with that. Mom wanted what was best for Evelyn. I remembered her voice behind my lilac wallpaper, saying that Evelyn was throwing her future away, she was so young and so beautiful and Mom didn’t want her to end up as a dependent housewife who had to ask her husband’s permission every time she wanted to buy a new pair of socks.

“I don’t think that’s true, Evelyn,” I started, but it was all I got to say.

“It is so,” she said.

She turned on the television and finished her beer while I went upstairs to the bathroom and swallowed two migraine pills. I was glad I hadn’t forgotten them this time, because a fluorescent purple web was crawling into my left eye.

Later that night, I fell asleep in the living room because I had to. The guest bedroom didn’t exist anymore. I woke up on the couch on Monday morning and heard Evelyn in the kitchen, asking Kieran what kind of cereal he wanted—Frosted Flakes, Apple Jacks, or Cap’n Crunch? Next there were Shane’s babbling noises and Patrick slamming barbells against the basement floor, and soon Evelyn rushed past me with the kids, saying that Kieran was late for kindergarten and I should remind Patrick that he had to drive me to school. I didn’t mind going to school, because I wouldn’t have to eat lunch in the bathroom. Summer was coming back today.

The front door shut and I watched from the window as Evelyn sped away in her minivan. It was warm outside. A filmy haze covered the block, and everything was quiet except for the neighbor’s Doberman barking and Patrick exercising downstairs. I went into the kitchen to eat breakfast and he came in a few minutes later, sweating, naked from the waist up.

“I gotta drive you to the city this morning, don’t I?” he said, and I nodded as I tried not to stare at his chest. “I’d better hurry up and take a shower. What do they do at that place if you’re late? Beat you with a ruler?”

I laughed. “I think they’d go to jail if they did
that
, Patrick.”

“Not when I was in school. Those nuns used to smack the living shit out of me.”

“There are no nuns at Hollister,” I said, and he told me that nuns were sadistic and vicious and the reason why his kids were going to public school. Then he went upstairs. I heard the shower running and thought sadly about Patrick as a young boy in a stiff uniform, being terrorized by ferocious packs of ruler-wielding nuns.

Nobody could terrorize him now—he was too tall and strong. I admired his broad shoulders underneath his shirt as we climbed into his truck at the curb. He stuck a cassette into the tape deck, Bruce Springsteen singing about the Vietnam War or something like that, I wasn’t really listening. Patrick was talking about Evelyn, saying that she seemed better lately, she was settling into a routine, and did she seem okay to me?

“I think she’s fine,” I said, because we both wanted it to be true.

Twenty minutes later, Patrick left me at Hollister and I had to fight my urge to clutch the back of his truck as he drove away. Even though Summer was here, I would have preferred to spend the day with Patrick, to hang out at the firehouse, maybe even sit in the fire engine as it raced around Queens, but of course that was just stupid.

“I’m back,” I heard Summer say when I was spinning the combination on my locker.

We weren’t in any classes together, not even homeroom, but at least I could eat lunch in the cafeteria like a normal person, which I did later that day.

Summer sat beside me, nibbling a Chipwich and talking about some guys who’d installed new tile in her parents’ bathroom. One of them was from Canada and was incredibly good-looking and flirty.

“He gave me his number,” she said. “Not that I’ll call. I’ll just add it to my collection.”

She meant her collection of phone numbers, which she kept in her bra drawer with the velvet diary. Her insistence on mentioning every single man who flirted with her was getting on my nerves. “That’s nice,” I said, glancing around the cafeteria.

I spotted Leigh Ellis a few tables away. She was sitting alone, skimming through a novel. She’d skipped homeroom again this morning and now she left the cafeteria early, waving at me on the way out. Summer was utterly shocked.

“You
know
her?” she asked.

“She’s in my homeroom,” I said.

Then Summer started talking. Gossiping, really. She told me that Leigh didn’t have to go to class because one of her relatives had founded Hollister Prep and her uncle was some big-deal lawyer, and she was going to graduate from this school with good grades even if she lit the place on fire and danced nude in the ashes.

“She had a boyfriend,” Summer whispered. “College guy. He died in a car crash upstate last winter. I heard she was driving … drunk, supposedly. She was out of school for three months after that but of course she didn’t have to repeat the year. She seems to have recovered, because she’s got a new boyfriend already … I’ve seen him pick her up in a Porsche. He’s got a nasty scar on his mouth … I guess he must’ve been born with a cleft lip.”

I nodded, dizzy from information overload. The bell rang and we walked out of the cafeteria and through the hall, where Summer pointed to a bronze plaque with words underneath a man’s aristocratic profile.
FREDERICK SMITH HOLLISTER
, it read.
FOUNDER OF HOLLISTER PREPARATORY ACADEMY, 1932
.

“Leigh isn’t directly related,” Summer said. “I think the connection is through her uncle—the lawyer I told you about. It’s his wife’s father or something. I’m not sure because she doesn’t talk to anyone.” Summer waved to a group of guys who were walking past and then she spoke into my ear. “Listen, Ari … I’m glad you’re here. But everybody at Hollister … they don’t know about anything that happened in Brooklyn and I don’t want them to know. Understand?”

I nodded. “It’s our secret.”

The next day I found out that Summer had been wrong when she said that Leigh didn’t talk to anyone, because she talked to me in art class. We also talked during the cool, late-September mornings when she actually came to homeroom, throughout October while we drew the bright orange trees outside our art-class window, and into November, when all the leaves were gone and the sky filled with clouds and we sketched everything in black and gray.

It was on one of those afternoons that our teacher announced a project, a paper we had to write about a modern artist. He listed names on the blackboard and said that we could work in pairs, and Leigh and I both raised our hands when he pointed to
Picasso
scrawled in lime-green chalk.

“Do you want to come to my apartment tomorrow to start working on it?” she asked from her seat behind me, and I turned around.

She was wearing her SUNY shirt and she was touching her silver bracelet. She looked optimistic, but I let her down. I paused for too long, thinking of everything Summer had told me. The car crash. The drunk driving. I liked Leigh but I wasn’t sure if she was safe outside the iron gates of Hollister Prep.

She read my mind. Her face dimmed and I thought again about the gossip. It could all be a lie or a skewed version of the truth. Summer should have known better than to spread rumors. So I accepted the invitation.

six

Summer
slammed her locker door in a snit the next day. I’d just told her that we wouldn’t be riding home together because I was going to Leigh’s apartment, where we planned to extract Picasso information from books that we checked out of the Hollister library.

But that wasn’t exactly what happened. Leigh and I were walking away from school beneath a dusky sky when she said something about Twenty-third Street. She thought she’d lost her bracelet but she hadn’t—it had been found, she had to pick it up, and I didn’t mind, did I? It would only take a few minutes and the bracelet meant a lot to her.

The wind bit at my cheeks as I shook my head. Then Leigh and I sat in a series of subway cars that took us to West Twenty-third Street, which was crowded with old row houses. They were narrow, four stories high, separated by just a sliver of an alley. We stopped at a building that had fire-escape ladders across the top three floors, and windows covered with plywood. I heard noise inside, rough voices and drills and hammers—construction workers, who I saw at the far end of the building after Leigh opened the door.

The place had a dank smell, mixed with sawdust that the drills were kicking up. I listened to men shout at each other about nails and bolts, and Leigh started walking up the staircase in front of us. It was slim, long, advancing into darkness. I followed her, hearing the steps creak beneath my feet.

“This is my cousin’s place,” Leigh said as she rapped a red door with a gold knocker. “He’s planning to turn it into a dance club. His father thinks he’s insane.”

Her cousin opened the door and I saw his apartment—a renovated loft with exposed brick and a skylight and modern furniture, all black, leather, and glass. There was an adding machine on the coffee table, in the middle of stacks of receipts and cash.

“Ariadne Mitchell,” Leigh said. “This is Delsin Ellis.”

I guessed that Delsin Ellis was about twenty-four. He was stocky and average height, and he had dark hair, an aquiline nose, and eyes that were an unusual color. I couldn’t tell if they were green or gray or both.

“Del,” he said, extending his hand, and I took it.

“Ari,” I replied, which made Leigh sigh.

“I can’t believe either of you,” she said. “Such distinctive names and for some strange reason you shorten them.” She looked at me. “My cousin was lucky enough to be given a name that reflects our Native American heritage.”

I glanced at her necklace, at the arrowhead charm. Now it made sense.

“ ‘Native American heritage,’ ” Del repeated. “A hundred years ago, maybe. And mixed with German and Irish and everything else.”

Leigh crossed her arms. “We have blood from the Shawnee tribe and you know that, Del.” She looked at me again. “Del’s father and my mother are brother and sister. They’re from Georgia originally. The Shawnee used to be all over Georgia.”

“Nobody gives a shit, Leigh,” Del said, and waved us over to a bookcase. He took her bracelet from a shelf and she locked it around her wrist. It was an ID bracelet, the silver one she always wore. It wasn’t meant for a girl, it was made for a man, with heavy links and the initials
M. G
.

“Take it to a jeweler and get it shortened so it doesn’t fall off again. You might lose it in the street next time instead of in my car, and I don’t want that to happen,” Del said as I examined his face. I saw a ropy scar that began near the middle of his upper lip and weaved its way into his left nostril like a snake.

A scar on his mouth, a cleft lip—Summer was so wrong. Leigh hadn’t already recovered from her dead boyfriend. The bracelet that meant so much to her was probably his. And she didn’t have a new boyfriend. All she had was a cousin.

Leigh nodded and said that she and I should go, sounding raspy as usual. I’d recently figured out that there was never a cold or laryngitis, she was just naturally hoarse.

She kept talking after Del shut the door behind us and we were heading down the staircase. Then we were on the sidewalk and Leigh was talking about Del. I’d guessed his age correctly, and she was telling me other things—that his mother had died twelve years ago, that he had a younger brother, and that he was a college dropout.

“So many strings were pulled to get him into Northwestern,” Leigh said. “He didn’t exactly have the grades. Then he starts a fight with some engineering student over a parking space and gets himself expelled.… Del knocked out the guy’s front teeth, if you can believe it. My uncle had to fork over a lot of money to make that one go away.”

“Oh,” I said, for lack of anything better.

The wind blew Leigh’s hair across her face, long copper strands against freckled skin. “I shouldn’t talk badly about him. Everybody else does,” she said. “His name … it’s Native American, and it means ‘He is so.’ My uncle always says ‘He is so stubborn,’ ‘He is so angry,’ ‘He is so stupid.’ This whole thing about starting a business … Del bought that dump with some of the trust-fund money he got from his mother. I hope it works, because nobody has any faith in him and he needs something meaningful in his life.”

“Oh,” I repeated, wondering why Leigh was telling me all this. But I was the only person she ever talked to at school, so I figured she was lonely and there was nobody else who would listen.

Leigh’s apartment was in a modern building on East Seventy-eighth, with a doorman who ushered us through a glass door into a mirrored elevator that played Muzak as it carried us to a small but well-decorated and bright apartment on the twentieth floor. It had fashionable furniture, windows covered with sheer turquoise drapes, and silver appliances in the kitchen.

We sat down at the kitchen table and pored over our library books, scribbling Picasso facts on loose-leaf. I was reading about one of his most famous paintings,
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
, when I had to use the bathroom.

“Through the living room and down the hall on the right,” Leigh said, pointing in that direction. She was too engrossed in Picasso to lift her head.

I walked through the living room, past a heather beige sofa, an oak coffee table the color of sand, and a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on the wall—an abstract flower, a blast of pink and orange and a light shade of turquoise that matched the curtains. Then I was in the hallway and a door at the end opened. I saw a tall, willowy young woman with spindly limbs, hair the same color as mine, and a beautiful face. She wore a short nightgown that was practically transparent.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Rachel.”

“I’m Ari.” I was closer now, so her face was clear. Her skin was olive-toned, smooth and flawless. Her nose was prominent but perfectly straight, her eyebrows were thin and arched, and her eyes were dark and shaped like almonds. Rachel was model-beautiful, as gorgeous as those women on the cover of
Vogue
. I couldn’t imagine who she was, maybe Leigh’s older sister, but they looked nothing alike.

“Do you need to use the girls’ room?” she asked. “You go ahead … I’ll wait.”

I locked myself in the bathroom and took care of business quickly because I couldn’t be rude and keep Rachel waiting. She slipped into the bathroom after I left. Leigh was still reading about Picasso in the kitchen when I walked in.

“We should go to MoMA,” she said after I sat across from her. “To get a feel for his work. We can write about it better that way, don’t you think?”

I nodded. Then I heard water running in the bathroom and Leigh heard it too. She said she didn’t know that her mother was awake, and I couldn’t imagine that the woman I’d just met could be anyone’s mother, especially not someone as old as Leigh.

“Did you see her?” Leigh asked, and I nodded again. “She doesn’t usually emerge from her slumber before five o’clock. You know … the fact that she’s old enough to have a teenage daughter practically gives her the vapors. Not that she’s really old enough to have a teenage daughter. She’s only thirty-four.”

I subtracted quickly—thirty-four, sixteen. Leigh was born when Rachel was eighteen. Evelyn had been three months short of eighteen when she gave birth to Kieran, but I wasn’t inclined to blab my family secrets, so I didn’t say anything.

Leigh told me that Rachel always slept during the day. I assumed she had some kind of night job, although I couldn’t imagine what that was. She didn’t seem the type to make change in a tollbooth or take care of sick people in a hospital.

“What does she do?” I asked, thinking that I was too nosy, but Leigh didn’t mind.

“Hangs out at nightclubs, mostly. Studio Fifty-four was her favorite when it was really popular. She’s friends with one of the owners. He’s sick now, though. AIDS.” Leigh whispered the last word, like AIDS could be caught just by mentioning it. “My mother actually does have a job … she’s a makeup artist on Broadway. It used to be
A Chorus Line
and now she’s doing
Cats
, but only Tuesday through Thursday. She won’t work on weekends—too busy with her social life. She’s lucky that my uncle supports us or I don’t know where we’d be. Living in a cardboard box on the corner, probably. Or in a trailer park in Georgia.”

She said
Georgia
with a hokey Southern accent, and that was the last thing she said for a while. We went back to our books, to Picasso. We read about his rose period and his cubism period until I noticed that the apartment wasn’t bright anymore.

“I’d better go,” I said, glancing around for my coat. “It’s late.”

I’d forgotten that Leigh hung my coat in the hall closet. She brought it to me and I was closing the buttons when she said something about calling a car service to take me home.

“I’ll be fine on the subway,” I told her, thinking I only had a ten-dollar bill in my wallet and I was sure that wasn’t enough to pay for a cab ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

“It’s dark outside, Ari,” Leigh said. “And dangerous. The subways are filled with people who’ve been kicked out of Bellevue too early. Don’t you watch the news?” She picked up the phone and started dialing. “This is the service my uncle’s firm uses and it’s completely free … I won’t take no for an answer.”

I couldn’t find a reason to argue. We rode the elevator downstairs, where we stood with the doorman until a glossy sedan arrived. I slid onto the backseat and watched Leigh wave goodbye through tinted windows. Then I listened to 1010 WINS while the driver sped through Manhattan, past skyscrapers and traffic lights in a swoosh of red and yellow and green.

Soon we were in Brooklyn and I saw different things—unassuming houses, Saint Anne on our lawn. The wind was so fierce that she and little Mary looked like they were huddling to stay warm.

Mom was in an apron on our steps. The front door was open behind her and I smelled our dinner from the sidewalk as the sedan drove off. I walked toward her, sure she was annoyed that I was late and that I hadn’t bothered to call. Her expression was a combination of ticked off and puzzled, and she was looking down the street at the sedan, its scarlet brake lights glowing in the dark.

“What the hell is this?” she asked.

I assumed she was wondering why I’d been driven home by a chauffeur as if I was some kind of socialite, but I was thinking of other things. I was thinking of a dilapidated row house on West Twenty-third Street and a bright apartment on East Seventy-eighth, and Delsin Ellis with the Shawnee blood and the scar on his lip. I had no idea how to answer Mom’s question because I couldn’t explain any of it.