Roomies (21 page)

Good time to sign off…

Lo

I got nothing for yes/no/maybe so right now.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 3

NEW JERSEY

I’m babysitting for Vivian when I get Lauren’s e-mail and it makes me want to cry, too. I wish I could drop everything to write back but Vivian is teething or something and clinging to me like crazy and she’s red-faced and awful and screaming “Mama.” I wish I could cry like a baby—really let it rip. Maybe Lauren and I will have to put down our bags, shake hands, send away anyone who drops us off, and have a good full-on bawl before starting college for real.

“Please please please, Viv,” I say, in my best soothing tones. “Stop crying, sweetie. Please stop.”

The straight-up wailing I can almost handle; it’s the “mamas” that really get me.

I’m seriously going to lose it.

And won’t that freak Vivian out? Surely, babysitters are not supposed to completely lose it. It’s not like Viv and I can have this good sort of cathartic moment and then both feel better after it. She expects me to be in control. She expects me to be the grown-up. I grab one of her favorite toys, a phone that says “Hello!” and beeps
when you open it. I hold it to my ear and say, “Oh, you want to talk to Vivian?” and hold it out to her but she’s not listening. She’s still wailing. So I go to the freezer—a big drawer under the double-doored fridge—and open it and pull out one of her frozen teethers—this one bright pink and shaped like a foot. I hand that to her and she shoves it in her mouth and I sit down on the recliner in the den and she calms down and sits on my nap and gnaws on that foot.

Crisis averted.

Hers, at least.

I could seriously cry at the drop of a hat these days. And people would probably think it was because of the whole Losing of the Virginity—if people actually knew about that—and anyway, that’s not it.

As far as first times go, in all the possible scenarios I have imagined over the years, the Moonlight surpassed all expectations by being really
right
feeling. Even now, three days later, I keep seeing vivid flashes of the time we spent there. Just an image of his hand here or there, a certain faraway look on his face, the bones of his hip, the painting on the wall next to the bed, of a girl wearing a bonnet collecting seashells in a bucket. When I snapped a picture of it with my phone he said, “That’s what you want to take a picture of? To commemorate our night together? Because I’m happy to pose.”

“Yeah,” I laughed. “That’d be great for when Vivian plays with my phone tomorrow.”

So he’s going to talk to his dad today and I am going to brace for impact. And hope that I get my period, like, right this second, even though I’m not due for another week. We used protection, of course, but wouldn’t it be just my luck?

What’s making me a little bit sad about the whole thing is that,
apart from Lauren, there’s no one I really want to tell about it. And as I picture her and her gaggle of siblings while I am holding Vivian—an only child whose parents are out at some fancy restaurant where people probably give babies dirty looks—I feel so alone that for a second I contemplate packing up some of Viv’s things and kidnapping her, raising her in some far-off state as my own.

Something about the closeness I feel with Mark makes me
really
wish I had a brother or a sister, all joking about birthing them myself aside. Which may sound totally screwed up because I definitely don’t see him as a brother, but there’s an ease with him, a sort of acceptance, that I imagine comes with the territory when you have siblings. No one but my mother has to love me just because I am here and I am me and am their daughter/sister/whatever, and obviously even my mother seems to forget that loving me is supposed to be her first job on this planet. But then I decide maybe I’m being melodramatic and Justine and I have been meaning to get together anyway, so I call her but she doesn’t pick up.

Vivian has finally snapped out of her funk and is getting into all sorts of trouble in one of the kitchen cabinets, so I go sit on the kitchen floor and we make music with pots and pans and wooden spoons. I say things in a high-pitched singsong, like “Oh, Vivian, if you only knew what I just did!” and she’s happy again and I let her glee rub off on me, at least until it’s time to go home.

If my mother senses a change in me, she doesn’t let on. She’s up when I get home from babysitting and tells me there’s leftover KFC in the fridge. I fix a plate and join her in the living room, where she’s watching a reality show about one of those über-nannies. There is a
lot of screaming and crying and judging going on. I’ve never asked my mother why she and my dad didn’t have any more kids after me. It’s the sort of question that answers itself, doesn’t it?

Because he was gay.

Because they were too young.

Because I was a mistake.

Because the whole marriage was a sham, even if it took them a long time to realize it, longer than any rational person, myself included, can understand.

Sometimes, when I’m wondering if my family situation has permanently screwed me up, I’m surprised by how sane I feel. And having the courage to trust my own feelings actually makes me feel even saner, even more grown-up. But I really wish things weren’t so complicated.

I answer Lauren’s e-mail in my head:

Yes, I am in love with him.

The show ends and my mother tosses the remote at me and says, “I’m hitting the hay.”

“Me too,” I say. “In a few minutes. Once my chicken digests a little.”

“TMI,” my mother says, and that pretty much sums it up.

Mark sends me a text a few minutes later:
Miss you.

I’m about to write back when another text says
Go outside right now.

I get up and pad to the door and open it and there’s a small box on the doormat. It’s blue. Like turquoise blue. With a white satin ribbon tied around it. And even
I
know what that means, probably because my mother once dated a guy who bought her a necklace from Tiffany and she wouldn’t throw the box out for years. In fact, she might still have it.

“Mark?” I whisper, not wanting my mom to hear, and then he steps out from behind a tree by the sidewalk and walks toward me.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” he says.

And so I sit on the top step and he sits next to me, his knee touching mine, and I stare at the box for a minute. I know he’s rich. Or at least his parents are. Richer than I may ever be. “It’s too much,” I say. “Whatever it is, it’s too much.”

“Elizabeth,” he says. “Please let me do this. Let me do things right.”

I want that, too. But I am putting together a puzzle in my head, connecting a piece of what he has just said with one from our conversation in the parking lot of the Moonlight. “The last time,” I say. “That other girl. You didn’t do things right.”

He shakes his head.

“So you think this is going to somehow going to make up for that?”

He grabs my hand. “No, it’s not like that. I just want you to know how I feel. That’s all.”

So I undo the silky white ribbon that’s tied in a bow around the box and then take off the top. Inside, a small turquoise sack that says TIFFANY and has a white silky drawstring sits perched on a bed of cotton.

“I haven’t gotten you anything yet,” I say, and he shrugs and says, “Doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t.”

I open the little bag and slide out a silver necklace. There are two charms on the chain, one a heart and the other a circle that says LOVE in engraved script.

“I totally don’t want this to freak you out,” Mark says. “But I mean it.”

I open the clasp and put the necklace on and say, “I mean it, too,” and then I lean over and kiss him full on the mouth and find myself wanting to cry again. Because it’s almost as if I can see into the future, and see a time when the necklace won’t fill me with warm feelings but will sit in my jewelry box collecting tarnish and getting tangled after this whole thing has run its course, whatever that course may be.

“So not to spoil the mood or anything,” he says then. “But I talked to my dad.”

“And?”

“And…” He shakes his head.

“What? He said he won’t break it off?” I’m talking as softly as I can.

“No,” Mark says. He is still shaking that head. “My dad is such a class act that he said, ‘Good, I was looking for an out anyway.’ ”

I think I actually feel my stomach churn. “Wow.”

“Yeah,” Mark says. “Wow.”

“Well, my dad’s no prize, either,” I say; then I spit it out. “I asked him if I could come stay with him for a few weeks, since things with my mom are so weird, but he’s in Italy on vacation.” It all sounds so dumb now. “Not that he should fly home or anything, but I don’t know. I just…” I feel myself getting choked up again. “I just wanted him to be there for me. You know, in my hour of need or whatever.”

A tear breaks free from my eye, runs down my cheek.

“Well, it was a terrible idea,” Mark says, and he slides his arm around me. “Leaving me? Before you absolutely have to. I mean, duh.” He nudges me and I love him for trying to make me laugh. “Plus,
I’m
here in your time of need.”

“How’d you get to be so”—I wipe away my tears and some stuff at my nose, too—“normal?”

“Who? Me? Normal?” He laughs and I laugh. He says, “Trust me, I’m all sorts of weird. I just hide it really well.”

Then he kisses me quickly and we sit quietly in the night as the wind rustles the leaves in the trees. I think about that noise, about trying to record it—the way it sounds sort of like paper brushing together—because the sound of trees in San Francisco will be different. I know this because I know about the US Department of Agriculture Plant Hardiness Zones, which help categorize what kinds of plants and trees will flourish in a particular location. What if I myself, like some of the trees here, am really an East Coast specimen? What if I thrive here, in Zone 6, but will die out in California, in Zone 10?

Then again, is this really thriving?

I reach for my necklace, touch both charms. “So what do we do now?”

“I guess we wait for it to all go down?” He doesn’t sound convinced. “But how will we even know?”

“Trust me,” I say. “I’ll know.”

After Mark leaves, I go inside and up to my room and it strikes me for the first time how weird my bedroom is, because there are two twin beds in it. One is almost always covered in clothes and books and magazines and whatever and it’s almost like I forgot it was a bed for a long time and only now remembered. My mother told me years ago it was so I could have friends sleep over and I’ve done that a few times but not many. Maybe that’s why I feel so lonely all the time and have such longing for a sibling… for a roomie. Because of that ghost bed that has been living in my room all these years.

Which reminds me…

Lo,

I don’t think you’re a floozy, for the record. Friends with benefits isn’t a bad situation to be in at this point in our lives, is it? Then again, maybe it takes a floozy to know one. I mean, I lost it with a guy I’ve barely known a month! Who am I to talk? Would you WANT Keyon to be your boyfriend?

So. The loss of the Big V. It was actually sort of great. We went to a motel that was hilariously lowbrow but not in a skeevy way. More like… old school? Old Hollywood? Anyway, it was sweet and intense. I know there are probably a lot of people who would think I’m too young to know that it was the right time or whatever but what do they know? I am a little bit freaked out in an “I can’t believe I did it!” way but not that much. And yes, I think I am in love with him.

And that sounds crazy.

It feels crazy!

I consider writing more, like about how it only hurt a little bit at first and then felt right and a tiny bit funny. Or about how I feel like I know him in this different way now and also know myself in this new way. Even about the painting, and how for a second when I saw it I thought I was going to cry, I don’t even know why. But that all feels like a potentially serious overshare. Part of me wants to write
Just do it!
So we can talk about it after we’ve both crossed to the other side. But of course I can’t. I opt to move on.

As for soaring, well, sign me up. Because I, too, am getting pushed out of the nest. Unfortunately, my nest never really felt like a home to begin with. And I am the only bird in my flock. Which means that if I soar I’m going to ultimately end up feeling guilty about leaving Mother Bird all alone, unsoaring, but soar I must. Okay, enough with my bad analogy. I’m sure your family still needs you. But I’m sure they’ll survive without you, too. Isn’t that sort of the way it works?

Oh, and as for my dad. He’s vacationing in Italy! Who can give shelter to their long-lost daughter when there is wine to be drunk and villas to visit? Must be nice is all I can say. Must be nice. I’m relieved that you don’t think it’s weird. The gay part of the situation, anyway. They split when I was five and the last time I saw him I was like seven? I guess that’s the weird part, right?