The Guy Not Taken (6 page)

“Fine,” I answered. It wasn’t exactly true. When I’d gone home for Thanksgiving there’d been a “For Sale” sign stuck in front of the house but, Nicki had told me, nobody had made an offer yet. In the eight months since their divorce had become official, my mom had dragged my father into court twice. Each time he’d promised to pay her the child support and alimony he
owed. He’d send checks for a month or two, then he’d stop, and the whole process would start again, with court orders and subpoenas and staggering lawyers’ bills. He hadn’t sent the tuition check to Princeton that fall. My mother and I had gotten a loan as a stop-gap measure until my financial aid application went through. I remembered her detached expression as we sat in a back office of our Connecticut bank, the way her lips had twitched underneath an unfamiliar coat of lipstick as she stared blankly at the stack of documents until the loan officer handed her a pen and pointed out the space for her signature.

Nanna smoothed her short hair. “Mother told me you have a kidney infection,” she said to my sister. Nicki rolled her eyes and grabbed at her back dramatically. “I’m dying,” she groaned. Nanna glared at me. “How could you let her come here with a kidney infection? Take her luggage!” Meekly I complied, heaving both of our backpacks over my shoulder and struggling with the straps of Nicki’s duffel. Nicki smirked at me, but was quickly distracted by an elderly woman driving a golf cart.

“Oh, can we get one of those?” she asked.

“The car’s just across the street,” Nanna said. Nicki weighed her options and elected to continue walking. “I called my doctor,” Nanna continued. “We can see him first thing in the morning. How’s school?” she asked, peering at Nicki through her bifocals.

Nicki scowled. “It’s a dump,” she cried, and began enthusiastically listing her university’s shortcomings: bad food, ugly guys, clueless roommate, library too far from her dorm, unsympathetic RA, girl across the hall plays Janet Jackson incessantly, infirmary sucks. We walked through the glass doors into the inky Florida night, and the humidity hit us like a fist. I shifted Nicki’s bags in my arms as sweat trickled down my back.

Nanna led us toward her enormous cream-colored Cadillac sedan. The car had belonged to my grandfather, who’d died in
1985, and it still smelled faintly of his cigars. It wasn’t the most practical vehicle, getting, as it did, approximately eight miles to the gallon, but Nanna kept it and drove it at least once a week, all the way to the car wash a mile away from her condo, to have it waxed and vacuumed.

She unlocked the car doors and stared at Nicki, frowning. “Just what’s wrong with the infirmary?” she asked.

“Well, for one thing, I had to wait for two hours before I saw anyone,” Nicki said. “Then they said there was nothing wrong with my kidney. They didn’t even give me a blood test! They didn’t even ask me the right questions!”

Nanna pursed her lips. “So you don’t have a kidney infection.”

Nicki didn’t back down. “I might have one,” she said. I wiped my face and heaved Nicki’s backpack into Nanna’s immaculate trunk, right next to the first-aid kit and emergency gallon of bottled water. “They forgot to ask me if I was experiencing pain upon urination.”

“Well, are you?” I asked.

“No, but that’s not the point.”

Nanna threw up her hands in despair. “Nicki, Nicki, Nicki,” she said. “What are we going to do with you?”

But Nicki wasn’t listening. Kidney pain forgotten, she opened the heavy car door and flung herself into the backseat, behind the cramped, skinny, bald, Sansabelt-slacks-clad figure of Nanna’s eighty-three-year-old gentleman caller, Horace. “Let the games begin!” she cried. I stowed the rest of our luggage and slammed the trunk shut.

•   •   •

My sister’s earliest childhood memories were of torture. She talked frequently, nostalgically, about the happy days of her youth when she’d give Jon his bath and pour alternating pitchers of hot and cold water over his back—never hot enough to
burn him, just hot enough to make him extremely uncomfortable. “I liked the noises he made,” she said. She hid my books, stole my diary, listened in on my telephone conversations, and finally found her niche and calmed down a little when she landed a spot as the coxswain for the varsity crew team, where she was actually encouraged to scream insults at people. She’d sit in the tiny seat at the stern of the boat, knobby knees drawn up to her chin, a headband holding a miniature microphone perched on top of her curls, red-faced and cursing inventively, utterly in her element (especially when I was the stroke and she could direct her insults, and her threats to tell our mother about the copy of
Delta of Venus
she’d discovered under my mattress, specifically at me).

But high school was over, the crew team was gone, and I sensed that my little sister’s college experience wasn’t turning out as well as her time in high school had. We’d run up a shocking phone bill her freshman year, working through her assignments long distance. Every few weeks she’d mail me a paper to proofread (translation: rewrite), but when we’d been home for Thanksgiving, she’d just shrugged when I asked how her classes were going. Since then, she hadn’t sent anything to read, and when she called it was mostly to complain about her geeky roommate, who used up her hair mousse and slept with a retainer and a night-light. “Fine, fine,” she’d say, every time I asked about her classes and her coursework and whether she’d gotten her grade on her Introduction to Sociology class yet. “Everything’s fine.”

•   •   •

“Horace!” Nicki crowed. She flung her arms around his neck and planted a loud kiss on his sun-spotted pate. “My man!”

“Hello, Nicki!” Horace boomed. He worked his way out of his seat and around the car so that he could hold the door for my
grandmother. He gave me a hug on the way back, and I breathed in his smell of mothballs and Hall’s eucalyptus cough drops. Horace had survived two wives, several strokelets, a heart attack, and quadruple bypass surgery and, along the way, experienced what his doctors and our grandmother politely referred to as a substantial hearing loss. In other words, Horace, despite the finest hearing aids Medicare can buy, was as deaf as a post. But he was a sweet man who loved my grandmother and could put up with my sister (perhaps because he couldn’t really hear her).

“How are you?” he asked Nicki when he was back in the car.

“I’m having a sex change!” she shouted.

“Glad to hear it!” he replied.

Nanna shook her finger at Nicki, who stuck out her tongue in reply.

“Your mother worked hard so that you girls can have a nice vacation,” Nanna said, undeterred. “I want you both on your best behavior.” I rolled my eyes. I didn’t need to be told to behave myself, even if Nicki was another story.

My sister adjusted her necklace, fluffed her curls, and pinched my thigh as she groped underneath me for her seat belt. “Cut it out!” I said.

“You know you liked it,” she said.

“What’s that?” asked Horace.

“Nothing,” I yelled. I rolled down my window, yawning. I wasn’t very well rested, thanks to my roommate, who slept with neither a retainer nor a night-light but, rather, a rotating cast of our classmates, whose ranks had most recently swelled to include my crush from philosophy class freshman year. After two and a half years of staring, I’d finally worked up the courage to talk to him. Sadly, our first and last conversation had occurred in the quad in front of my dorm room. Sally, my roommate, had sauntered by, and that was the end of that. The three of us went
to dinner together where, over pork chops and green beans, the two of them had discovered a history class in common. They’d skipped dessert and gone to the library to study, leaving me alone in the room. At two in the morning, they came giggling through the door, clambered into the top bunk bed and noisily consummated their relationship, apparently unaware of, or untroubled by, my presence in the bottom bunk, three feet away. I’d given Sally a stern talking-to in the morning. She’d sniffily loaded up her purse with her toothbrush and a fistful of satin underwear and departed, presumably for the philosopher’s single across campus. Every night since then I’d barely slept at all, waking up once or twice every hour at the sound of laughter or a door slamming, thinking it was the two of them showing up for an encore.

As we drove down the palm-tree-lined streets of Fort Lauderdale, Horace noted the passing attractions in a booming voice. “Heavenly Delights,” he read as we motored past a billboard. “Nude Oil Wrestling Nightly. Now Hiring.”

“I could get a job!” said Nicki.

Horace, who caught only the last word, nodded his approval. “Jobs are wonderful.” Nanna’s lips tightened.

“Why I let your mother talk me into this,” she said. She glared at the two of us in the rearview mirror. “You’ll have to share the pullout couch, and I don’t want any complaints.”

“Forget it,” said Nicki. “She could accidentally kick me in the kidney.”

Nanna zoomed onto the freeway. “Too bad.”

Our grandmother’s guest room hadn’t changed in the fifteen years she’d lived in Florida. It was decorated in shades of sea green and coral, with family pictures in frames on the bookshelves and crocheted samplers hanging on the walls, and there was a pullout couch against one wall and a tiny television set
on a dresser against the other. I pulled out the bed and piled the pillows neatly in the corner. Nicki unzipped her duffel, stacked her clothes on Nanna’s card table on the screened-in porch, placed her cosmetics and a Walkman on the bedside table, and scooped up all three towels on her way to the bathroom. After some perfunctory bickering about whether this bed is really the most uncomfortable one we’ve ever slept on (I argued in the affirmative, my sister maintained that the ones at Camp Shalom were worse), I pulled the blinds shut and we fell asleep.

•   •   •

At three o’clock that morning, Nicki poked me in the side. “Josie?”

I grunted and rolled over. She poked me again. “Josie, wake up!”

I opened my eyes. “What?”

“Can you die from a kidney infection?”

I exhaled and flipped my pillow over. “No.”

She shook me again. “If I needed a kidney transplant, would you donate one of yours?”

“Nicki, it’s three in the—”

“Would you?”

“I’ll give you a kidney first thing in the morning if you’ll please just let me go back to sleep.”

There was silence until 3:02. Then Nicki asked, “Do you think there are alligators in the pond?”

I flicked on the light and glared at my sister, a hundred and five pounds of distilled pain in the ass in a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top with “Where’s the Beef?” emblazoned across the chest. “Nicki, we’re on the second floor.”

“Oh.”

I turned off the light, flopped down hard on the bed, which
creaked in protest, and shut my eyes. I’d finally managed to drift off when Nicki whispered, “I’m failing everything.”

I sat up in the darkness with my heart pounding, thinking that I might still be asleep, that this might be the continuation of a bad dream. “What?”

“It doesn’t matter. Dad never sent the tuition for the next semester. I’m going to have to leave anyhow.”

I flicked the light on again. “Turn it off!” Nicki snarled, and rolled over so that I was talking to her back. Her boxers and tank top were striped with light and shadow from Nanna’s plastic blinds, and her head was tucked into her chest like a turtle’s.

“Nicki, have you talked to anyone? Does Mom know?” I winced, imagining how our mother was going to react to this news, now that she’d finally started getting herself together. She’d planned a vacation, and even if it was only to her mother’s house, and Nanna had probably paid for our plane tickets, that counted for something. “You can apply for a loan, you know, or maybe emergency financial aid.”

“I’m dropping out,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t even like it there.”

“Nicki . . .”

“Forget it,” she said, and reached across me to turn off the light.

“You can’t just drop out of college.”

“Yes, I can.” Her bony shoulder blades pulled together. “Not everyone needs to go to college. Not everyone’s like you.” She yanked the covers up to her chin. “Can you bring me a snack, please?” All those years of training had conditioned me well. I got out of bed, padded to the kitchen, located crackers and juice, a glass and a napkin. By the time I got back to the guest room, Nicki was sleeping. I set her snack on the table, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and eased into bed beside her.

•   •   •

When we woke up at eight in the morning, Nicki was raring to go, as if our late-night conversation had never even happened. She yanked the covers off me and hooted at my drab cotton nightshirt until I grabbed my swimsuit and slunk off to the bathroom. “How’s your kidney?” I inquired on the way.

“Much better, thanks,” she replied. She’d turned her back to me and was wriggling into the scraps of screaming yellow spandex that constituted her bikini. “In fact, I think I am well enough to take some sun.”

Nanna dropped us off at the beach at ten, along with an ancient red-and-white Thermos full of ice water, a beach blanket, and a bottle of sunblock. “Be good,” she said, as we stood on the sidewalk in flea-market sunglasses and flip-flops, and sun hats that had once been my grandfather’s. As soon as Nanna’s Cadillac pulled away from the curb, Nicki shucked off her tight pink tank top and stalked along the sand in cutoff shorts and her bikini top, basking in the sun and the admiring glances as she looked for the perfect spot. Laden with the blanket and the Thermos, my bag and my sister’s, I struggled to keep up. “How about here?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the scant shade of a palm tree.

Nicki nixed it. “We have to find interesting people.”

I put down the bags and wiped my face. “Why?”

She stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “So we can eavesdrop, of course.” After ten minutes, she found three bathers who suited her: a very skinny blond girl in a white string bikini sharing a blanket with two short, swarthy, heavyset men whose chests and backs were thick with hair and whose necks and wrists were festooned with gold.