The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (5 page)

d. If there is a slim chance to no chance at all of your changing lovers, is it possible that you might have some horrific congenital disease that could cause your early (and yes, very sad) demise?

e. Does psychosis leading to suicide run in your family?

f. Why is it so hard to hate you?

I’m completely embarrassed by these questions. Is it possible to make writing worse with revision?

10. Should I include in chapter three that I pretended to be asleep to see if Fleur would sneak into Richard’s room? The reason I didn’t put it in is because whenever I pretend to be asleep, I do fall asleep. So I really didn’t learn anything.

11. Richard. Probably I should include more memories of him. Like that time just before he moved when he dropped his chewed gum into the waste can under the kitchen sink, and when he left, I retrieved it and chewed it another hour. It was like French kissing with him, I thought.

No, I don’t think I’ll put that in.

Then there was that time up at Gooseberry Falls near Lake Superior when Richard and Bjorn climbed under the falls and Richard slipped and sliced his chin open. Blood gushed everywhere. He took off his T-shirt and held it wadded tightly against the wound as we hiked back to the road. Bjorn drove him to the hospital in Duluth. When the emergency room doctor began stitching on his chin, Richard laid the bloody shirt down on the table.

“You want me to throw this out?” I asked him, picking up the shirt.

“Yeah, might as well. Thanks, Boo.”

I nodded and left. I hid the shirt under the backseat of the car. I still have it hidden in the bottom of my wicker chest at the foot of my bed.

Geez, I can’t write this kind of stuff. I’ve never told anyone about this. It makes me sound obsessive, like Ashley. I don’t
know why I kept the shirt. It’s not as if I ever look at it or anything. I never do, as a matter of fact. But I’ve never thrown it out either.

There’s that time when Richard and Bjorn were making out with these two girls in our living room after the senior prom. Richard was with Madelaine Dusendorf—that was her real name; I’m not changing the names of the guilty. I had gone down in what seemed like the middle of the night and got more than I bargained for. Richard and Madelaine were all enmeshed. Somebody was making wet, sucking noises. Really gross. His tie was nowhere to be seen.

I’m getting sick and depressed as I write this stuff down. It reminds me of something else. Something I don’t want to think about. I don’t want to think about any of this right now. I don’t care about the silly revisions. Poop on the revisions.

“I’m not sure you’re going to be able to find a tree two days before Christmas,” Mother said at breakfast the next morning. This is
Chapter
Four
, by the way. It was ten o’clock, and this was my second breakfast. My dad, who makes breakfast between semesters and on weekends, had busted himself with omelettes and hash browns and raspberry compote and freshly ground coffee.

“There’s a place on Grand Avenue, I remember,” Bjorn said. “Their trees were always overpriced and slow-moving. We’ll try there first.”

“Does everyone eat this well in Minnesota?” Fleur asked, and I could see my father’s head tilt the way Ruffy’s used to do, to the side, as if he’d heard his name. I knew he was trying to place a certain sound in her voice, maybe the slightly constricted mid-Central vowels, a sound that didn’t come from Newport Beach, where she’d been raised. I could hear it too.

“Only on weekends,” my mother said. “When
he
cooks. The rest of the time it’s oatmeal.”

“I’m glad I got here on a weekend.” Fleur bestowed a full smile on my father, which did not go unnoticed. His ears grew pink. My mother noticed it too and laughed out loud, which made his ears grow even pinker.

“I love oatmeal,” Richard said, explicitly for my mother. “Especially with apples in it.”

She nodded at him. “With apples it will be,” she said.

“What a brown noser,” Bjorn said. “He always did kiss up to older women.”

“You’re just jealous,” Trish said.

Bjorn bit her playfully on the neck. “What have I got to be jealous about? I’ve got you.” He nuzzled her and she squirmed, delighted.

“Are we talking about older women like
me
?” Mother asked.

“He said it, not me,” Richard said.

“It’s all relative, my dear.” My father kissed the back of Mother’s neck.

I wondered if Richard would kiss Fleur’s neck and make this happy sexual play at breakfast complete. To my relief, he seemed content to eat his omelette. Fleur watched my parents carefully.

The back of
my
neck itched considerably. I was happy when the back-door bell rang and I could get up to answer it.

Enter Ashley Cooper.

“I
knew
you were home, even though the answering machine said you weren’t.” She stepped into the back hall. “It dropped to eighteen below last night. The heat wave is over.” She loosened her muffler and unzipped her parka.

“So what? You’ve got your love to keep you warm,” I said.

She smirked. “Mmm, yes I do.” She heard the commotion in the kitchen. “Are you guys still eating?” She looked down at her watch.

“Yes, come in. You’ll never guess who’s here—”

“Hi, Ash,” Bjorn called.

Richard stood. “Hi, Ashley.” He held out his hand.

Ashley clutched it in both of her hands. “My gosh,” she gushed, not letting go of his hand, “I haven’t seen you guys in ages. How are you?”

“We’re brilliant, thank you,” Bjorn said.

Trish punched him.

“I don’t think you’ve met Trish.” Bjorn was laughing.

“Oh, you guys got married in Hawaii last summer. I was so jealous when Kate got to go to Maui.”

“Well, you went to Mexico—”

“Yeah, but Mexico—” She pretended to gag. “Driving through Mexico is nothing but dead animals on the side of the road.”

“This is Fleur St. Germaine,” Richard said. He had recovered his hand.

I could tell that Fleur stunned Ashley a little. There was a quarter note of a flinch when Ashley saw her sitting next to Richard. Not that Ashley skipped much of a beat She doesn’t give up her power easily. “How fun for you to be able to come,” she said and actually patted Fleur on the shoulder. She was smiling her barracuda smile. All the sharp little teeth showing. Her patronizing manner is the reason most girls hate her.

Fleur, who did not smile, said, “How fun for you to be able to meet me.”

I think my father snorted over the frying pan, and Richard shook his head as he sat back down. Trish and Bjorn exchanged a look I couldn’t read. You notice these things when you wear glasses the size of Dayton’s Department Store.

“Sit down here, Ashley,” my mother said, giving up her chair on Richard’s other side.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said, sitting down in one clean motion. “Kate,” she said, leaning across Richard, “do you want to go down to the Nicollet Mall this morning and do some last-minute shopping? I still have to find something for Kirk.”

“Well, I guess …” I hesitated. I really wanted to go buy a tree with the others, but it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t invited. Maybe they still thought of me as a tagalong. Still age twelve going on thirteen. “I don’t know why not—”

“No, you have to help us buy a tree!” Bjorn said. “It’s your familial duty.” He turned to Ashley. “She’s going with us this morning.”

I relaxed. I was invited.

I could see Ashley’s brain cells regrouping. “I thought you had a tree already,” she said. “The one on the piano—”

Bjorn waved his arm, erasing the very idea of such an insignificant tree. “I mean a
big
tree. A touch-the-ceiling tree. An old-fashioned Christmas tree.”

“A macho tree,” Trish continued. “An Arnold
Schwarzenegger tree. A tree with a trunk the circumference of a barrel.”

Fleur picked it up: “A tree big enough for an eagle’s nest.”

“For a tree house,” I said.

“A tree to hang yourself on,” Mother drawled. She set a cup of coffee in front of Ashley and pushed the sugar bowl and cream pitcher gently in her direction.

“You guys are so crazy!” Ashley said and leaned into Richard, the way I had seen her do with dozens of boys in the last several years. It always seemed to work—that leading out with those tidy little boobs. The phrase book would describe those boobs as “firm high-perched breasts.”

“That sounds so fun,” Ashley was saying. “We never buy trees anymore. We have three synthetic trees—they reach to the ceiling, but they don’t have that wonderful piney smell, even when Mother sprays them with a pine aerosol. It just doesn’t work.”

Fleur covered her eyes with a cupped hand.

“Well, why don’t you go with them,” Mother said. “It won’t take that long, and you and Kate can go shopping later.”

“Would it be all right?” Ashley was asking Richard, not anyone else.

Richard burped loudly, and I thought Fleur was going to lose it. “Perfect,” she whispered under her breath.

“ ’Scuse me,” Richard said, his fist pressed against his smiling lips. “I seem to have lost control here.” He let out a funny giggle, hiccuped, and started laughing helplessly.

“Just don’t lose control of your sphincters,” Bjorn said, pushing his chair back. “Or you go to a motel.”

“Bjorn!” Mother said, but she was laughing.

Dad pulled a box of chocolates from the cupboard above the fridge and offered Fleur the first choice. “Dessert,” he said.

Fleur blinked at the chocolates. “Professor Bjorkman,” she said, “will you marry me?” She plucked out a dark cherry liqueur. “They’re my favorites.”

You should have seen my father blush. “Here,” he said. “Take the whole box,” and he handed it to her, laughing. No sign of narcolepsy this morning. No sirree.

This book could become dangerous. My father, age fifty-four, could fall hopelessly in carnal love with Fleur St. Germaine, leave my mother, age forty-five, and me, his computer, his classroom, his phonetic alphabets, and Minnesota, and go off to some beach somewhere with a twenty-one-year-old college student. It happens all the time. It happened to Ashley’s mother and Ashley about eight years ago.

But this is not that kind of book. And my father is not that kind of man. He and my mother shared one of those damned “knowing smiles” that romance novels are filled with. He was just enjoying Fleur’s beauty and her attention. She made him feel young. Maybe she even made him feel sexy. My parents fell in love twenty-five years ago. And they’ll stay in love until they die. I’m the novelist and I know.

Richard was looking at Fleur as if he’d like a proposal of marriage himself, or was that my paranoia? Fleur had passed the box of chocolates to him, and he offered the
box to Ashley without taking one himself. She took one wrapped in gold tinsel, unwrapped it slowly, and said to Richard, her lips about an inch and a half away from his, “This is a
special
one,” and then fed it to him.

He didn’t exactly pull away. It wasn’t as if I could blame her or anything. Ashley was doing what she’d been doing with any guy in reach since I had known her. I remember the time she told me about “the lure.” She made it sound like fishing, and she herself was the bait. We were in my bedroom in front of the dresser mirror. “Puff your lips out a little like this—no, part the lips slightly—yes, good, and move your chin forward, half closing the eyes. Oh, it doesn’t work with you! Your glasses absorb your whole face.”

It was true; I wasn’t right for vampy looks. “Can’t you just get a boyfriend by having common interests?” I asked her.

“Who do you know who enjoys identifying esoteric American dialects and keeping a journal written in the phonetic alphabet?” she asked me. She was practicing the pout in the mirror.

“My father.”

“Gross.”

“I wouldn’t mind finding someone like my father. I like my father.”

“He’s always sleeping.”

“No he’s not. He’s intelligent. He’s funny. He’s kind and sensitive. He loves classical music—”

“Borrring!”

“And he’s a terrific dancer.” I realized that my father
fit the descriptions found in the personal ads in the back of his college alumni magazine.

“None of that counts,” Ashley said, finally turning away from the mirror to look at me.

“What counts?”

Her tongue flickered between her teeth. “Thighs,” she said slowly. “Boys’ thighs.”

That was it? Thighs?
Thighs?
What about warmth and kindness and humor? What about intelligence and stability? But then I remembered that Ashley’s father hadn’t had a lot of those qualities and bit my tongue.

Richard Bradshaw is the only boy I’ve ever known who has the above-listed qualities. He wasn’t in a whole lot of pain when she fed him a second chocolate.

On the other hand, I was miserable. Ashley could get anyone she wanted anytime she wanted. She leads out with her breasts, after all. And she’s so sexy. I can see that she is. I have never competed with her for a guy. I know I could never win. And perhaps that’s why we have been able to be friends. I have always been a willing listener to Ashley’s escapades.

It was too painful watching Richard eating, literally, out of her hand. I would not be able to listen to her talk about him, ever. I could feel my shoulders slumping along with my morale. It took all my strength to keep my head from rolling forward and clunking onto the table.