Why We Broke Up Read online

  We were still standing Frankenstein looking at it when Joan came in clutching textbooks and artichokes. “Hey,” she said. “What is that in my kitchen?”

  “Our kitchen,” you said.

  “Who’s making dinner tonight,” she said, taking off a scarf I loved, “and every night? Us? In our kitchen? Or me?”

  “This,” I said, enough of the Slaterton Sibling Bickerfest, “is—”

  “Wait, I know what it is,” Joan said. “This is the igloo thing you told me about, Min. You actually made it.”

  “It’s Greta’s Cubed-Egg Igloo on an ice floe of lemon-pickled cucumber with a caviar surprise.”

  Joan put down her bags. “What’s the caviar surprise?”

  “There’s caviar in it,” I said.

  “Inside there?”

  “Inside the igloo, yes.”

  “And it’s all—eggs?”

  “We cubed them and then set them up. What do you think?”

  Joan cocked her head at it. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “I mean, it’s sort of awesome.”

  “Good for a party?” I asked.

  “The guests would have to be tiny to get inside.”

  “Joan,” you said.

  “And what are those things lined up drying?”

  “Egg cubers,” I said. “We had to buy a bunch.”

  “I’m sure that’s an investment you’ll never regret,” she said.

  “Joanie.”

  “Well, we’ll make another one for the real party,” I said. “This is just a trial run.”

  “The birthday party thing, I’m remembering,” she said.

  “Real Recipes from Tinseltown,” I said. “It’s Will Ringer’s recipe, inspired by Greta in the Wild.”

  “You said you were going to make an igloo for Lottie Carson’s eighty-ninth birthday,” she said in wonder, “and then you did, just like you wanted. Just like you said, I mean. Wow.”

  You stood there grinning in a small way.

  “Let me get my camera,” she said. “Can I take a picture?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “This sort of thing,” she said, her voice serious with lingering disbelief, “should be documented.”

  She bounded upstairs and we were alone in the kitchen. After a stretched-out silence we both started talking. I was going to say something stupid and you said—

  “Sorry, what?”

  “No, you go.”

  “But—”

  “Really.”

  You took my hand. “I was just going to say that I know it’s been weird, this afternoon. Awkward.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But I think it’ll be better, you know, after,” you said. “Tomorrow, I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, I think you’re right.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  “And you know,” you said, “you can, it’s not a big deal if you change your mind.”

  I leaned against you, hard, like I’d forgotten how to stand for just a sec. “I won’t,” I said, and it was true. But it was just true then. “I’ll never change my mind.”

  We stayed like that listening to Joan close a closet and come down. Ed, it’s ridiculous, but I loved her too. And could goddamn kill her for not saying something. Though what she could have said that I could have heard I cannot for the life of me see.

  “I’m using the Insta-Deluxe,” she said to Ed. “Remember? We have shoe boxes full of us from this. Old-fashioned I know, they probably don’t make them anymore. But digital didn’t seem good enough for something like this.”

  “They still make them,” I said. “They got trendy for a while after that scene in Sinister Development.”

  She took the picture with a whir and the gears of antiquated stuff. The picture came out of the slot, and she shook it so the fog would clear quicker. “So what are your big Friday night plans?” she asked us, shake shake shake. “Ooh, I know. Eating a big igloo.”

  I shook my head. “Can’t. I have sort of a family thing.”

  “Oh,” Joan said, with a sideways look at you. You’d told me you had better stay home, Ed, if you fucking remember. “Well, I’m celebrating my last midterm on the sofa with fried artichokes and garlic aioli and The Sand on the Beach.”

  “That’s supposed to be amazing,” I said, but you were already taking my hand, so I didn’t say what I wanted, Wish I could stay.

  “And when I’m gone tomorrow night,” Joan said sternly, “I expect only a limited amount of hanky-panky from you two.”

  “Min already has a mother,” you said. “Don’t be hers, Joan. Plus, we’re just going out.” This was not a lie.

  “OK, OK,” she said. “You’re right. Her mother will make sure, from what I hear. But I had to say something, Ed.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” you said, like you did too. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  “I love you,” I said, in front of your sister, and you kissed my cheek.

  “Don’t forget your picture,” Joan said quickly, so you wouldn’t have to say anything, I guess. She put this in my hand. We all walked toward the door and stopped for another sec to look at the igloo and then the photo and then the igloo again. It was better in real life than looking at it now, bigger in the kitchen, more grand, like a fantastic something you could walk into, a princess castle, a dream come true. Here it just looks strange. It was strange. But I loved it too.

  “Why do I have the picture?” I said. “You’re the one who said it should be documented.”

  “You keep it, Min,” Joan said quietly. She said, “You dreamed it up,” or something. She said it was my idea. And then she said something like, keep it in case it doesn’t work the next time. Keep this, in case it doesn’t work when you try it again.

  I don’t know why this is the part I kept, this thing that was on the towel rack. It seems gross a little, like a reminder that they did have to change the linens after all. If I could have chosen anything, it would have been something from the lounge part of Dawn’s Early Lite Lounge and Motel, where I’d been once freshman year after a synagogue dance this guy Aram took me to. Aram and I had tall ginger ales and stared up at the ceiling of the lounge, taxidermy birds dusty in a circle along the molding, with a huge butterfly in the very center, flapping slowly slowly slowly with motorized fans for wings, and speakers playing nature sounds. It is extraordinary, Ed. I’ll give you that. Even the big sign outside, the Lite lit up and flashing, is glamorous and attractive with those three arrows taking turns illuminating so the arrow is moving, leading everyone on South Ninth to the parking lot behind. It’s probably the most extraordinary place we have. You thought hard and found it, Ed, the place to take me.

  But I didn’t want to go to the lounge. You said there was no rush but there was, we’d already pushed dumplings around at Moon Lake, pretending it was only another date. I ate maybe three bites. The whole night I tasted snow peas in my nervous mouth. Plus maybe somebody would see us in the lounge. I waited in the car while you brought back the keys.

  The motel was laid out in curves and balconies at the edge of the vast lot. It probably looked like something from the air, I could see it in an aerial angle like a still in When the Lights Go Down as we crossed the dark asphalt with our bags. “Establishing shot,” is what the caption would say, “from The Moron Who Thought Love Was Forever.”

  The room looked like a room, not extraordinary. The curtains closed with a long plastic wand like something Mika Harwich uses on the horses in Look Me in the Eye. The desk was flimsy, the hair dryer tiny as a revolver on the bathroom wall. There was a plastic globe plugged into a corner socket brand-named Spring in the Air that smelled like a violated flower. I went down the hallway to get ice and found next to the machine some empty cardboard boxes stacked up loosely, all from furniture. TWO WOODEN HEADBOARDS it said on one. ONE FLOOR LAMP. I swear, ONE NIGHT STAND.

&nbs
p; “I can’t make this work,” you said when I got back. You’d turned the TV around like you were giving it a haircut, fiddling with the plugs and holes and whatnot, looking for a connection.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to film it, of course,” you said.

  I must not have looked like I knew you were kidding.

  “A movie. I was supposed to be able to play it through the computer. I thought it’d be nice.”

  “What movie?”

  “When the Smoke Clears,” you said, “from Joan’s collection. It sounded, you know, like something you’d like. And me too. These people, a soldier and a veterinarian meet in the war, out in the country I guess, it said in the description—”

  “It’s good,” I said quietly. I put the ice down but kept my hands leaning on it. On the dresser were two small bottles, a beer for you and white wine from Australia, shipped or flown I thought, around the world. All the way.

  “Oh, you’ve seen it.”

  “Part of it. A long time ago.”

  “Well, we can still watch it on the laptop.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Oh.”

  “I mean, maybe.”

  “There’s strawberries too,” you said, lifting an eager container out of your backpack. I thought, you’d thought of everything.

  “How’d you find strawberries in November?” I took them to rinse in the sink.

  “There’s this place over on Nosson. It’s only open for ten minutes Wednesdays at four AM.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I love you.”

  I saw me in the yellowy mirror. “I love you too.”

  When I came back out, you’d changed the lighting somehow, though the bedspread was still ugly, nothing to be done. I put down the dripping berries. Your shoulders shrugged up underneath your shirt, I couldn’t wait to see them again, beautiful things. Extraordinary. And I looked you in your eyes, wide and lit with fondness and mischief and lust. For me, like me. I had such, you would not believe the such a feeling I had. You couldn’t film it, it couldn’t be captured. It couldn’t happen almost, but there it was happening anyway. I kicked off my shoes, biting my lip because I might have laughed. I was thinking of something Coach always said to you and your team at practice while I watched. OK people, he said sometimes, let’s get right to it.

  Criminy, I remember you saying. I was smiling because I didn’t have to be guided like I thought I’d be, not as much. I could do some things. Some parts I was very good at.

  “Was that time better?” you said.

  “It’s supposed to hurt,” I said.

  “I know,” you said, and put both hands on me. “But, I guess I mean, but what is it like?”

  “Like putting a whole grapefruit into your mouth.”

  “You mean it’s tight?”

  “No,” I said, “I mean it doesn’t fit. Have you ever tried to put a whole grapefruit into your mouth?”

  The laughing was the best part.

  And then late at night we were starving, remember? “Room service?” I said.

  “Let’s not push our luck, we’re paying cash,” you said, and found a phone book. “Pizza.”

  “Pizza.” I was fierce with the thought of it. My first grown-up meal, I couldn’t help thinking, and what I want is kid stuff.

  I was bashful and hid in the bathroom when it was delivered. I listened to you talk normally to the guy and even laugh at something, like it was all normal, standing in a T-shirt and boxers in the doorway, taking the pizza with the dollars in change on top while I huddled by the sink running this through my hair. I felt like I was over by a pole, a bicycle or a dog, while the owner chatted oblivious and relaxed. It was your ease, I realized, your ease and expertise that made me nauseous. I grabbed the comb, the cardboard message on the rack, like I was hiding shameful evidence. I’d never felt something like this, but you’d done it all before.

  My first pizza bite sent sauce squirting onto my top, and it looked so bloodlike I had to take it off. You gave me this, another one of the astonishing number of items in your bottomless backpack, and I slept wearing it next to you, and then nights and nights at home, so long on me it felt like I was inside you, stretched down your tall legs and curled up in your chest where your heart beat. Which I guess made us even. We kissed so tender when we woke up, never mind our sour breath and the bedspread even uglier by day. But we had to run for coffee before Lauren called or anyone found out. It was already afternoon, a disapproving gray in the sky. “I love you too,” I remember saying, so it must have been a reply, you must have said it first, but even now, looking at this shirt, I try not to think or picture anything at all. I wore this, Ed, is what I think, like shelter and skin, that night alone on the roof of the garage. The bed felt too empty to sleep, so I was out in the night lighting some of those matches, Mayakovsky’s Dream feeling decades ago, the tiny fires dying out in the wind as soon as they left my hands. Cold, for no reason. Hot, for no reason. Smiling, crying, nothing at all, this shirt my only company that night and so many nights after. I wore it, this careless thing you don’t even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn’t a gift, this thing I’m returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.

  OK, these were a gift, waiting in my locker Monday. But now you had my combination, so you could do things like this. So ugly, or not ugly, really, but wrong for me. I don’t like to think about, Will! Not! Goddamn! Think about! who helped you pick them out. Or what were you thinking. Look at them, dangling stupid. What were you thinking?

  Take these relics too. Al just told me where he got them, at Bicycle Stationery, in one of those big baskets they lug out front like some snake-charming’s going to happen. But when he put them in my hands that morning, he didn’t tell me that. There was too much else to tell. He’d been sitting on the right-side bench, our usual spot, which I hadn’t touched since you and I had started smacking my life around. It looked like a relic, too, relicky Al with relicky Lauren and a spot for me grave-robbed empty.

  It was a wonder I was there, so lost in quavery thought that I’d forgotten to enter Hellman the new way, to wave at you shooting hoops and maybe even kiss a little through the chain-link fence like separated prisoners. But there I was, and Al walked to meet my walking. Even after ten days, girls probably do walk different after virginity, just because we think everyone can tell.

  “What are these?”

  “I swore to Lauren that I’d talk to you,” Al said, “and I know you swore too.”

  “What’d you swear on?” I said.

  “Gina Vadia in Three True Liars.”

  “Good one,” I said, although I knew it was just because of the sports car.

  “How about you?”

  “The Elevator Descends.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you didn’t call,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, turning the bundle around in my hands, “I thought I should communicate by postcard instead, but I don’t have any. Oh, look.”

  “They’re invitations, I thought,” Al said. “For the party.”

  “You’re still,” I said, “helping with it?”

  “I don’t think Lottie Carson should suffer just because we had a fight.” He was talking in his perfect deadpan, but his face was wary, almost desperate. Behind him Lauren walked slowly backward away, watching us both like we were a dangerous climb. “Look at them.”

  I flipped through without untying. “Wow, volcanoes.”

  “Perfect, right? Because of her in The Fall of Pompeii?”

  “Sure.”

  “I mean, if we’re going to honor her right.”

  “Yeah, thanks. Ed and I were saying that we should invite her first, make sure she doesn’t have other plans. I want to take her flowers, do it in person.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, I’m nervous about it,” I said. “Mayb
e I’ll just write a card.” I swallowed a long slow swallow of nothing. “Thanks, Al. These are cool.”

  “Sure. What’s the use of friendship?”

  “Right, OK.”

  “Listen, Min.” Al put his hands so deep in his pockets I thought I’d never see them again. “I don’t think you and Ed—”

  My hand closed on the postcards. “Don’t, don’t, don’t say anything about Ed. He’s not whatever you think he is.”

  “It’s not that. I don’t have any opinion of him.”

  “Please.”

  “I don’t. That’s what I’m saying. What I said, the things about him I said—what I’m saying is that there’s a reason I said them.”

  “Because you don’t like him,” I said, never in the world thinking I would talk in this tone to my friend Al. “I get it.”

  “Min, I don’t know him. It’s not about Ed is what I mean.”

  “Then what—?”

  “There’s a reason.”

  “Well,” I said, sick of this shit, “then tell me the reason. Stop secreting around about it.”

  Al looked behind me, at the ground, everywhere else. “I swore to Lauren I would tell you this,” he said quietly, and then, “Jealousy—OK?—is why.”

  “Jealousy? You wish you played basketball?”

  He sighed. “Don’t be an idiot,” he said, “and it would make it easier.”

  “I’m not. Ed—”

  “—is with you,” Al finished for me, of course. The school got wider, the whole place. There are so many movies like this, where you thought you were smarter than the screen but the director was smarter than you, of course he’s the one, of course it was a dream, of course she’s dead, of course it’s hidden right there, of course it’s the truth and you in your seat have failed to notice in the dark. I could see them all, every reveal that ever surprised me, but I could not see this one, or know how I could not have known.