Why We Broke Up Page 15

  “Hey, Min.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “What are you? I know it can’t be Hitler, but it looks like it.”

  I sighed. “A prison warden. I lost my hat. You?”

  “My mom. Lost my wig.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Punch? The real stuff?”

  “Yes,” I said. My insides were wild with coffee and the roller-coaster night. I sat down while he poured it.

  “Having a good Halloween?” he asked me.

  “Never.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  We clinked plastic cups, unsatisfyingly.

  “So how’re things?”

  “Things?”

  “Ed Slaterton, I guess I mean.”

  “Yeah, I thought you meant that,” I said.

  “Well, everyone’s talking.”

  “Give me some more punch,” I said.

  Joe obliged me. That had been the problem. “That well, huh?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Driving you to drink.”

  “I guess,” I said, drinking and gesturing dramatically. “I’m a basketball widow.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “No, no. But sometimes. You know, it’s a different thing.”

  “Well, I guess you don’t give up at the first sign of trouble,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at me while I blinked at him.

  “Sure I do,” I said to him, the closest to sorry I ever got. “What about you? I heard Gretchen Synnit.”

  “Nope,” Joe said. “That was just a cast party. I’m dating Mrs. Grasso now.”

  “Oh, nice. Though I think gym teachers are usually lesbians.”

  “Really?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve slept with them all.”

  “That’s why I’m dating Grasso,” Joe said. “To get closer to you.”

  “Shut up. You’re not missing me.”

  “Not really,” he said. “Though we did say we’d stay friends.”

  “We’re friends,” I said. “Look, we’re having an awkward conversation. If that’s not friendship—”

  “How about a dance?” he said, and his body teetered to a stand. Very drunk, I realized, but why not? Maybe a dance was what, somewhere for the fury to go. Why not, why the fuck? Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery? It was Halloween, and it was “Culture the Vulture” that was booming through the Scandinavian Hall when Joe led me out onto the floor already twirling, the song Joe just loves, the long version we used to listen to on his bedroom floor with shared headphones, my hand resting under his shirt on his smooth belly, driving him crazy, I knew. My unguarded vengeance, unbuttoning my costume for the first time, showing the lining of my dad’s forgotten coat and also what I was wearing beneath it. Which had been for you, Ed, just my best bra. Spinning and defiant in my head, flush with punch. And the unbuttoned coat. And Joe’s breath against me, sweat I could feel down my neck, the pulse of the second verse. And you, of course, you waiting out the song, self-conscious and stricken, Al too, pretending not to stare, staring, while I danced and pretended not to know. Joe dipping me so low my bra threatened fleshy disaster, I felt my heartbeat beating, brave and fierce, my legs liberated and my arms up in the glorious air, the lights glitter in my eyes, my lips open with the lyrics, and all my thinking erased from my skull while the song roared loud and free. Make it gone, is what I felt. Blow it to hell, kick its ass viciously in high heels, ravish it and rip it up, Ball and Bash both, this cavalcade of battering whatnot, fuck it and let it go. Do it different like they tell you you are. I danced and then I was through, done with every scrap of it, across the floor without looking back, not at Joe now alone, nor Al, nor Lauren, Maria, Jordan, anyone, nobody, everyone else. Just you, the thing worth keeping. The night late, the song over, the singer’s last “Madness!” echoing ness-ness-ness, and I got to you and met your eyes staring at me in hungry wonder. I knew who you were, Ed Slaterton. I opened my mouth and kissed you then, the first time all night, attacked you and surrendered completely, and let’s get out of here. I’m ready, I’m finished, let’s not break up, no, no. Take me home, my boyfriend, my love.

  And the afternoon after, as bubbly as the stuff they brought us. I met you in front of the Blue Rhino with the sun prickling down on me, a little late because it was hard to find, doubling back around the wrong corner, feeling parched with my limbs moving like gravel had fallen into the machinery, liquor lingering in my body like a song you hate in your head. Inside I wasn’t sure—the ceilings were so tall that every sound was an echoey poke at my headache, and the espresso machine kept growling like a wildcat. But the chairs were cool iron, with cushioned backs, and I was comforted and comfortable to sit in them. Pale and haggard, you ordered for us, and they brought this glorious beverage. How did you know about this? Where did it come from, this blessed thing? I never asked you how you knew it or if you knew it and now I’ll never know, in fact I have a feeling, I can see it, that if I struggled my way to the Blue Rhino again to find it, there would be no Blue Rhino. It would be a burned-out door maybe, or a brick wall caked with age and grime to show it had been a brick wall forever and the whole safe and sheltered afternoon had been some wish or dream taken back. Like the sad, sad scene in Sea of Souls where Ivan Kristeva revisits all the old haunts—haunts is how the subtitles put it—and we see that his happiness was some phantom now gone forever, a trick tucked back into its sleeve, only the three playing cards—seven-nine-queen of hearts—proof that he ever met the frightened deposed princess at the peddler’s cart, which now sits crumpled and cobwebbed in our hero’s stunned gaze. It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.

  Carl Haig was so unsteady he had to lean on the arm of a girl I thought was his daughter when he walked to his kit, tottering sunglassed and suited up in a dusty jacket, with hands that looked beaten and brittle even from our corner seats. There was a little applause, and he started fiddling around with the drums and cymbals, just tapping here and there to see what worked or needed fixing. The daughter drank from a tall glass of water, and a guy with a braided beard stepped up and hoisted a tall bass upright just as it became clear Carl was making a beat. The bass started moving some notes around, the cymbals rattled across the ceiling for a sec, and then the two of them were really in gear. I leaned over to rest my head aching on your arm and we sat still for a moment while the music buoyed us along. And then the light hit the waters, and I remembered and lifted mine from our table and took a sip and felt it chilly and fizzy in my throat and my whole body grateful and resurrected just as the girl put down her glass, knelt down low like she was adjusting her shoe, and then stood up tall with a huge golden object in her hands and began to play a deep and lovely melody on the trombone, weird and resonant, fluttering in my ears like the water in my stomach, and I breathed for the first time since Halloween started. Bashes and Balls vanished from memory. I can see it, Ed, I leaned deeper into you, felt you nodding along with the sounds in the room, and your warmth signaled through to me from under your shirt, lovely strong, safe and right. We snuggled up and drank more water, feeling like it had extra oxygen, like we were mineralized and filtered too. Pure, even. And I stretched up to find your ear and whisper it just as you murmured it to me, like we too had practiced together, like we were a combo apart from the frantic of the world, a dotted line sneaking away from the clutch of the school and pressure, just loose and steady beating together in a place nobody else could ever find.

  I love you, of course is what we said.

  It was just one long song, if song’s the word, just some low, calm tones spread out like a banquet in the air, and then it was over and we applauded and headed out the door, with my empty bottle in the pocket of the coat we’d bought to steal sugar, the coat you’d given back to me, the one I’m giving back to you along with everything. I stood outside with you feeling like the Blue Rhino was already fading, that if I didn�
��t say something about what I was feeling right at the moment, then everything would go away and we’d just be in high school again. So I said it.

  “I want to give you my keys.”

  You were smiling, but then you frowned. “What?”

  “I said I—”

  “What are you talking about? What does that mean?”

  I hated my fucking mother. “It just means—”

  “It sounds like it means moving in, but Min—”

  “Ed—”

  “We’re in high school. We live with our moms, remember?”

  So I had to tell you, in dimwitted humiliation. I had to tell you what I meant, quickly quietly, and once you knew you smiled again. You took my hand and you said you’d take care, you said it, Ed, of everything. You said you’d already found an extraordinary place, and I believed you. I believed you because look at this water, bottled in a place that sounds made up, the odd icons on the label, the way it tasted like nothing, but some kind of better nothing. What does it mean? Where does something like this come from? How can you find it ever again, just what you wanted at just the right time? Never, probably. It’s empty and nothing now, I don’t even know why I kept it, and I’ll keep it no more. It’s why we broke up, Ed, a small thing that’s disappeared or maybe was never really in my hands in the first place.

  The egg cubers, what did you do with the rest of them? Vintage Kitchen had seven and we bought them all, giggling, you even sweaty from practice able to charm a bulk discount from the rectangular mustached man who must have thought we were high. I felt that way, actually, with seven egg cubers in my bag. I took them out, small-talking with a muted Joan on her way out—I should have known then, again—and made an egg-cuber pyramid on the top of the toaster oven while you showered. You must have seen her back out of the driveway through your shutters, because you came down in your towel. We agreed afterward, my hip bruised from the knobs of one of the cupboards, that tomorrow for sure we’d try them out, but then I had to get home, my clothes feeling so loose and messy I was sure my mother could tell they’d been off. Our last everything but. In my room I dumped my reluctant homework onto my bed—you can guess just how crucial biology was feeling this month—and found an egg cuber I’d missed. I set it upright on my dresser and then forgot about it until we broke up and the chicken on the box mocked me with its comic-strip complaint. Staring at its own ass, reacting to the cubed egg, the packaging looks so odd and unchanged that Will Ringer probably saw the same thing he calls “a cunning li’l gadget” on page 58 of Real Recipes from Tinseltown. The chicken is saying pretty much the short version of this whole letter to you: ?#!* Ouch!

  When Lauren was seven, she saw symbols in a speech balloon, and her super-Christian parents were too God-fearing to explain that the symbols meant fuck, so freshman year she had this joke of saying “numbersign questionmark you” and “asterisk exclamationpoint the world.” It made me think of her and the alibi. I called her for the first time in forever, as she of course pointed out.

  “I know, I know,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah. I saw you getting busy at the Ball.”

  “Shut up.”

  “It’s true. You show up with your basketball superstar and then dance with your ex. Little did I know when we got into Hands of the Clock last year that you’d take those soap-opera lessons to heart.”

  “It was just a dance.”

  “Just a dance that made Gretchen leave early. And that’s not even counting the Al drama. Min, I really wish you guys would, you know, kiss and make up.”

  “He knows where to find me,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said sharply. “Basketball practice.”

  “He’s my boyfriend,” I said. “That’s what he does.”

  “That and take money from my purse.”

  “Lauren,” I said. Lauren and her Bible-sized grudges. Maybe she was the wrong one to ask, I thought.

  “I just want you two to be friends again. How are you going to have this movie-star birthday party if we’re not invited?”

  “You’ll be invited,” I said.

  “No, no,” she said. “Don’t divide and conquer. Al or nothing. Just call him, Min.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Sure, you’ll think about it. Call him.”

  “OK, OK.”

  “It’s bumming him out and screwing him up. Bonnie Cruz asked him out, and he said he wasn’t in a space to think about it, and he hasn’t dated since—”

  “I know, that girl in LA.”

  Lauren paused for a sec. “Someday we’ll get to that too,” she said, like a second-grade teacher about algebra. “But tonight I guess you called to hear me guilt-trip you, right? I mean, there’s no other thing, right? Couldn’t be.”

  “Well, I also wanted to hear you sing,” I said.

  She has this great voice mocking someone at church camp when she was ten. “Jesus is my dearest flow’r….”

  “OK, OK, mercy. I need a favor.”

  “His love sustains me through the hours—” “Lauren!”

  “Promise to call Al.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Swear it.”

  “I swear it on your mom’s Saint Peter statuette.”

  “Swear it on something holy to you.”

  I wanted to say you. Hawk Davies. “I swear on The Elevator Descends.”

  “OK. Good choice, by the way. Now, what do you need?”

  “I need you,” I said, “to invite me to sleep over this Saturday.”

  “Of course,” she said, and then “oh.”

  “Right.”

  “Like, you won’t be here.”

  “Right.”

  “But your mom—”

  “She’ll know I’m with you the whole night.”

  “Staying over,” Lauren said. The line was quiet like an error.

  “You’ll do it, right?”

  “Sounds like you will,” she said.

  “Lauren.”

  “And answer me this: If I get busted for this—”

  “You won’t,” I said quickly.

  “Says you, warden.”

  “You’ve snuck out before. With me. Your parents sleep early and then leave for church before anybody normal gets up.”

  “And if your suspicious mom calls with some suspicious last-minute thing to check on your suspicious story—”

  “She won’t.”

  “Where might I find you when I quickly call you to call her and save my stupid self?”

  “She’ll call my cell.”

  “What if she’s smarter than a monkey, Min? What then? Where will you be?”

  “You can just call me then.”

  “Min, you want me to be a friend and I am. So tell your friend what is happening.”

  “Um—”

  “Jesus’s light always in bloom—”

  “Asterisk exclamationpoint,” I said, and then told her.

  “Oh,” she said, slowly, shakily, like she was doing something painful. Ouch. Like letting someone down. Like biting her tongue. Like pushing a square egg out of her body. “Oh Min,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  The pen’s dying now. I’ll leave it at Leopardi’s when I’m done—no, why curse them with my litter? I’ll throw it into the box when I’m through with you, like movie thugs who run out of bullets and toss the gun. These last faint pages will be like this photo, a lost and blurry piece of old-fashioned magic capturing an image of a thing unclear, almost legendary. Nobody else made one probably, no matter what the stars say, and now there’s only this bad trace of ours I’m reminding you of, in fading ink. It’s like we never had anything.

  We got off the bus early and bought the eggs and cheap caviar and the British cucumber and one big tough lemon. You told me a story of Joan buying a lot of cucumbers years ago, by mistake, to make zucchini bread, and that reminded me to ask you and your whole household, her words, from my mom to Thanksgiving. I didn’t add all the
things she said, how the holidays must be so difficult etc., but I told you Joan could come cook. I told you we had to do it sometime, get you and your mom and me and my mom in the same room. I said maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, nice even. We talked about which Thanksgiving foods absolutely had to be made the same way every year, the traditionals, and which had room for experimentation and improvement. We didn’t agree much, and for some reason this time it was weird.

  You said maybe.

  At your house you showered and I boiled water. I lowered the eggs in like I’d learned from Joan with the Burmese soup, but Joan wasn’t there to approve. So it was just silent, the water off upstairs and no music in the kitchen because I knew you didn’t like Hawk Davies and you’d already been a good sport with the Blue Rhino, so I put on nothing and waited for the eggs. You came down fully dressed and started slicing the cucumber and kissed me on the top of my head. I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn’t point to. I tried to perk up reading enthusiastic from the cookbook, but it was actually a very simple thing to do. Instructions were superfluous. We smiled stuffing the eggs into the cubers but didn’t laugh, put everything in the fridge, and then it was time to wait. We lay on the sofa. The TV clicked and flopped. We got up, put the second batch in, sat back down. The afternoon stayed saggy. My stomach felt in a fistfight, even with your hands around me and the kisses at my ear. The timer went off again and we got to work, me eating the hard-boiled scraps as we assembled, which didn’t help my stomach any. You had it drawn out already in a Calc II sketch, your lines straight and protracted, your knife-work sharp on the curves. And then we had it, pushing the last touches into place. We beheld it like astronauts, our hands afraid to get any closer. It was magic, but it was weirder than it was magic, exactly what we’d planned, the perfect thing I’d found in the book actually there in the smooth white flesh, but still so strange. I thought, I couldn’t help it, of what Lauren said. Did we know what we were doing?