The Guy Not Taken (4 page)

Citibank heaved a sigh. “We’ll find your father,” he promised me.

“Well, when you do, could you tell him his kids say hello?” I said, but got nothing but a dial tone in response.

Mom used to tell us that the calls were nothing to worry about. “Be polite but firm,” she said, looking each one of us in the eye over dinner one night. But then a smooth-talking operator from a collection agency in Delaware tried to convince Jon that our father had won a brand-new car, which would be given to the next person on her list if Jon failed to immediately provide her with our father’s most recent contact information. “I gave you everything we’ve got,” Jon said, just like our mother had instructed.

“Doesn’t your father want a new car?” the woman asked. Jon, who’d been the only one home when our father’s Audi sedan got repossessed, said, “Yeah,” and the woman had said, “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that it’s wrong to lie?” Jon had hung up the phone, walked through the kitchen, past our mother (“Jon? Who was that? Is everything okay?”) into the garage and onto his bike. Mom spent the next two hours either on hold or talking in low, furious tones to the woman’s supervisor’s supervisor. When it started to get dark, she threw me the car keys and pointed toward the driveway. Nicki, who had the night off work, rode shotgun. We drove for an hour and finally found Jon at the country club, slamming a tennis ball into the backboard with a borrowed racket. The night was dark and humid, but the courts were brilliantly lit, empty except for my brother, as we pulled up beside the courts. “Jon?” I called through the open window. “Are you okay?” There was no sound but the crickets’ chirping and the thud of the ball against the wood.

“Get in the car!” Nicki yelled. “I’ll give you beer!”

“Nicki!” I said. “You are not giving him beer!”

Jon yanked the car door open, threw himself into the backseat, and slammed the door without a word. He didn’t say anything to any of us for the next week.

Nicki, on the other hand, seemed to relish the calls. “Hello-o-o?” she’d begin, lipsticked mouth smiling, eyelashes fluttering, as if the caller could be one of the half-dozen boys who’d flocked around her that summer. Her face would darken as the collection agent of the day began his or her pitch. “As one of us has undoubtedly informed you already, Jerry Krystal no longer lives here,” she would say. “And furthermore, I find it abysmally rude of you to persist in what I see as simple harassment!” She took great pleasure in pronouncing
harassment
in the English manner, with the accent on the first syllable:
har
assment. Jon and I would gather around to marvel at Nicki’s phone manner and she, obligingly, would ham it up. “To think that you people see fit to continue pestering innocent children in light of our father’s unfortunate and precipitous departure . . . are you familiar with the recent ruling of Sachs versus Engledorf!”

Generally, the caller was not.

“Wherein a large collection agency was sued for the sum of seven jillion dollars for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, after they made the poor child feel so guilty about not knowing his father’s telephone number that he turned to a sordid life of crime . . . yes, that’s correct . . . and don’t call back!” Nicki would slam the receiver down in its cradle.

“My pride wins again!” she proclaimed, breaking into an exuberant boogie, bony elbows akimbo, skinny legs bopping over the floor.

“Nicki,” Mom would say sternly, “those people are just doing their job.”

“And I,” said Nicki airily as she strutted up the stairs in her
ruffled miniskirt, with her Friendly’s uniform hanging over her arm, “am just doing mine.”

•   •   •

By the middle of August, the dry spell showed no signs of breaking. Heat lightning crackled through the sky every night, and we’d wake up to the sound of thunder, but the rain never came. One Monday night, Nicki and Mike, her boyfriend of two weeks, were in the family room with the videotape of
Jaws II.
I was huddled in my customary corner of the couch, curled up near the glow of the reading lamp with a scholarship application that had come in the mail that morning, trying to figure out how I could spin my father’s six months in ROTC in a manner that would convince the Veterans of Foreign Wars to pay for my books sophomore year.

“Look, Miguel, the shark’s coming!” Nicki pointed at the screen as violins screeched in the background. She shook her head and spooned up a mouthful of Swiss Miss pudding from a plastic cup. “I don’t know why those people went waterskiing on that beach in the first place. Didn’t they see the first movie?”

Jaws surfaced and made quick work of the pyramid of scantily clad lady waterskiiers. Milo rested his snout against my bare leg, and Mike, whose summer job in construction started at six a.m., let his spiky blond head fall back on a stack of pillows. His lips parted and he began, almost imperceptibly, to snore. Nicki gazed at the carnage, face lit by the blue glow from the screen, her spoon in her hand, the pudding forgotten.

“Wow,” she breathed as blood clouded the water. She grabbed the remote, rewound the tape, and replayed the massacre in slow motion, scrutinizing each shriek and severed limb.

“Fake,” she concluded in disgust. “Josie, look . . . you can see that the blood was just painted on that leg there. . . . Hey!”
she barked as she noticed that my eyes were on my application. “You’re not watching!”

I acknowledged that the scene is, if anything, too realistic for my tastes, and pointed out that her boyfriend was asleep.

“No, he isn’t,” Nicki proclaimed. She leaned back until her head reclined on Mike’s chest and began to prod his midsection vigorously with her elbow. His eyes flew open, and his hands went first to his carefully gelled hair, then to Nicki’s shoulders.

“Ow, quit it!” he begged.

Nicki beamed at him angelically. “Wake up,” she coaxed, “or I’ll get the dog to lick your face. You,” she said, pointing at me. “Wimpy. Make us popcorn.”

Mom entered the room wearing a swimsuit, wrapped in a towel, frowning and smelling of chlorine. She had a stack of mail in her hands and a letter pinched between her fingers. “Nicki,” she said, peering at the letter. “Did you tell someone from Chase that Dad was in the hospital, dying of testicular cancer?”

“Perhaps,” Nicki allowed.

“You can’t lie,” Mom said.

“They lie,” said Nicki.

“Well, don’t you want to be better than a bunch of underpaid collection agents?” my mother asked.

Nicki scowled, then turned back to the screen, where a handsome man was lying on the beach beside a woman in a bikini, caressing her arm. Mike couldn’t resist teasing my sister, who loathed skin-on-skin contact above almost everything else. “Look, Nicki. Unnecessary touch!”

“She gets eaten soon,” Nicki snapped. She pointed at me again. “Popcorn!” I hurried to go make it as Mom drifted out the back door. I’d gathered the popcorn and the big red bowl when Jon’s bike came crunching up the driveway. He walked
through the garage door, loped into the kitchen, and stood in front of the refrigerator, considering his options.

“I heard Mom on the phone today,” he said. He pulled a stick of butter out of the refrigerator and tossed it to me. I unwrapped it, put it in a bowl and then into the microwave to melt. Mom had left the lights in the pool on, and the greenish glow of the water filtered through the window over the sink. The Hendersons two doors down had one of those electronic bug zappers, and its sizzling sound punctuated the hot, still night.

“What’d she say?”

“That she’s going to have to put the house on the market in the fall. She can’t afford to keep it.”

I pulled the steaming butter out of the microwave. I’d known that things were bad from the creditors’ ceaseless calling, from the absence of the lawn service and the pool guys and the cleaning ladies. Late at night, I’d woken up from bad dreams listening to the sound of my mother walking downstairs, from room to room, past the painting my father had bought for their tenth anniversary, past the kitchen table where we’d all had hundreds of meals together, up to that fateful Thanksgiving feast, and past the photographs on the wall: Jon in his high chair and Nicki and me on the swing set, and Milo dressed in a baby bonnet for Halloween.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. It sounded like a lie even to my ears. Jon glared at me. He’d gotten taller that summer, and tanned from all the time on the farm, but at that moment he looked like he was five years old and we’d just dropped him off at summer camp and he was trying not to cry.

“It’s okay for you, you know. You get to leave. Nicki’s going to leave, too. You don’t have to live here with . . .” He cut his eyes toward the staircase, lowered his face, and shook his head.
“I’m out of here,” he muttered, and slammed the back door hard enough to make the cabinets rattle.

When I came back to the darkened family room with the bowl of popcorn, Mike was asleep again, sprawled on the couch. Nicki was standing in front of the television set in a short denim skirt and halter top, her finger on the fast-forward button and an angry look on her face. “I want some blood!” she said as scenes whipped by. “This is ridiculous. Where’s the damn shark?”

As if in response to her words, the image of a shark filled the screen. “Yeah!” Nicki cheered. “Finally!” But the shark swam away to the strains of the familiar danger theme without doing any damage. Nicki hit the fast-forward button again. “Rip-off,” she muttered. I handed her the popcorn. Mike betrayed his somnolence with a rasping snore. Nicki whipped her head around and glared.

“Well, I warned him,” she said. She dipped into the bowl of steamy, buttery popcorn and began to delicately apply kernels to Mike’s slack lips. “Milo!” she called softly. Milo trotted over, his truncated tail making vigorous circles and saliva dripping from his wrinkled jowls. He propped his stubby legs on the edge of the couch, then, with a grunt, heaved his entire body up, gave a few noisy snuffles, and began licking Mike’s lips. Mike woke up, spluttering, to find Milo’s muzzle poised as if for a kiss.

“Gross!” was all he managed before dashing to the bathroom. Milo gazed after him sadly. Mom walked into the family room dressed in a faded pink bathrobe with ripped lace on the collar, holding the telephone.

“What’s going on in here?”

“Shh,” Nicki hissed. “We’re watching the shark.”

Mom squinted into the darkened room, peering at Nicki. “Did you unplug the phone?” she demanded.

Nicki fluffed her perm, stretched her bare feet on the coffee table, and ignored her.

“Nicki?”

“Bug off,” my sister grunted.

“Look,” Mom said, “I don’t like these calls any more than you do. But we can’t unplug the phone.” She looked at Nicki sternly. “What if there’d been an emergency? What if someone was trying to call?”

“He never calls,” said Nicki, her eyes on the screen.

Our mother sighed as if she were being deflated. “Plug it back in,” she said.

“Fine!” said Nicki. “Miguel!”

Mike scrambled out of the bathroom. “Sorry, Mrs. Krystal, but . . .”

“She told you to,” Mom finished. “Nicki . . .” she began.

“Bug off,” Nicki repeated. On screen, the giant white shark was in the process of devouring what looked like the entire populace of a New England beach. The camera angled in for a closeup and the shark’s eye, obviously plastic, gleamed in the wavery underwater light. I slumped back onto the couch, with my pen and my application. The truth of our situation was so obvious it might as well have been engraved over the fireplace. Dad was never coming back. Mom was going to have to sell the house. I was never going to lose the twenty-five pounds I’d gained from too many late-night pizzas and bowls of cafeteria ice cream, and the cute guy in philosophy class was never going to see me as anything more than a girl who’d lent him a pen once, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to get a VFW scholarship. My family was falling apart, and all the good intentions and State of Israel bonds in the world would not be enough to save it.

Nicki froze the frame and snatched the bowl of popcorn away from Milo’s questing nose.

“Fake,” she said, holding the bowl against the scant curve of her hip. “Fake, fake, fake.”

•   •   •

It wasn’t the fake names and bad attitude that eventually spelled the end of Nicki’s tenure at Friendly’s. It was the satanic coneheads.

Nicki never liked the coneheads to begin with. “They’re very hard to make,” she complained of the children’s dessert made of a scoop of ice cream with whipped cream and an inverted cone on top. She’d describe to anyone who would listen how painstakingly she had to squirt the whipped cream so that it looked like hair, and dig through the bin until she found two matching M&M’s to serve as eyes, and how gently the cone had to be placed on top of the whole affair to simulate a witch’s hat. “My cones always slip,” she fretted, “so they look like sloppy witches. Or else I put too much hot fudge at the bottom and it winds up looking like its face is melting.”

But the kids of the Farmington Valley loved coneheads, so Nicki was compelled to make them by the dozen. Or at least, the kids loved coneheads until the last two weeks of August 1988.

It started innocently enough. Temporarily out of hot fudge, Nicki decided to improvise and place the head of the conehead in a pool of cherry sauce.

“And what shall I say this . . . item is?” asked the waitress, who was in her thirties with two kids and not much patience for the summertime help.

Nicki thought fast on her feet. “Conehead with severed neck,” she proposed. “Maybe you could call it a be-head?”

The waitress shrugged, ambled off to the table, and plunked the conehead down in front of a five-year-old dining with his mother.

The mother stared at the dessert, then at the waitress. “Miss,” she said, “this dessert doesn’t look the way it did in the picture.”

“It’s
bleeding
!” her son said.

“Oh, it is not,” said the mother sharply. As if to prove the conehead’s innocence, she dug in with her long silver spoon and took a big bite of vanilla ice cream and cherry sauce. “Tastes fine!” she proclaimed with a cheerful smile. The boy began to cry . . . perhaps because, unbeknownst to both waitress and mother, Nicki had picked up the large, lethal-looking knife used to slice bananas and was capering behind the counter with a crazed grin. No one could see her but my mother and Jon and me, seated at our customary booth, and the little boy with the be-head, whose wails pierced the restaurant.