Why We Broke Up Read online

  The first time I called your number it was like the first time anyone had called anyone, Alexander Graham Whatsit, married to Jessica Curtain in the very dull movie, frowning over his staticky attempts for months of montage before finally managing to utter his magic sentence across the wire. Do you know what it was, Ed?

  “Hello?” Damn it, it was your sister. How could this be the best number?

  “Um, hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Could I speak to Ed?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  Oh, why did she have to do that, is what I thought, picking at my bedspread. “A friend,” I said, stupid shy.

  “A friend?”

  I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

  There was an empty, buzzy moment and I heard Joan, though I didn’t know Joan yet, exhale and debate whether to question me further, while I thought, I could hang up now, like a thief in the night in Like a Thief in the Night.

  “Hold on,” she said, and then a few secs, hum and clatter, your voice distant saying “What?” and Joan’s mocking, “Ed, do you have any friends? Because this girl said—”

  “Shut up,” you said, very close, and then “Hello?”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. Um, who—”

  “Sorry, it’s Min.”

  “Min, hey, I didn’t recognize your voice.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold on, I’m moving to another room because Joanie’s just standing here!”

  “OK.”

  Your sister saying something something, running water. “They’re my dishes,” you said to her. Something something. “She’s a friend of mine.” Something something. “I don’t know.” Something. “Nothing.”

  I kept waiting. Mr. Watson, is the first thing the inventor said, miraculously from another room. Come here—I want to see you. “Hey, sorry.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “My sister.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s—well, you’ll meet her.”

  “OK.”

  “So—”

  “Um, how was practice?”

  “Fine. Glenn was kind of a dick, but that’s usual.”

  “Oh.”

  “How was—what is it that you do, after school?”

  “Coffee.”

  “Oh.”

  “With Al. You know, hanging out. Lauren was there too.”

  “OK, how was it?”

  Ed, it was wonderful. To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night. Sometimes it was just laughing at the comparing of favorites, I love that flavor, that color’s cool, that album sucks, I’ve never seen that show, she’s awesome, he’s an idiot, you must be kidding, no way mine’s better, safe and hilarious like tickling. Sometimes it was stories we told, taking turns and encouraging, it’s not boring, it’s OK, I heard you, I hear you, you don’t have to say it, you can say it again, I’ve never told this to anyone, I won’t tell anyone else. You told me that time with your grand-father in the lobby. I told you that time with my mother and the red light. You told me that time with your sister and the locked door, and I told you that time with my old friend and the wrong ride. That time after the party, that time before the dance. That time at camp, on vacation, in the yard, down the street, inside that room I’ll never see again, that time with Dad, that time on the bus, that other time with Dad, that weird time at the place I already told you in the other story about that other time, the times linking up like snowflakes into a blizzard we made ourselves in a favorite winter. Ed, it was everything, those nights on the phone, everything we said until late became later and then later and very late and finally to go to bed with my ear warm and worn and red from holding the phone close close close so as not to miss a word of what it was, because who cared how tired I was in the humdrum slave drive of our days without each other. I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did. But that’s why right there it was doomed. We couldn’t only have the magic nights buzzing through the wires. We had to have the days, too, the bright impatient days spoiling everything with their unavoidable schedules, their mandatory times that don’t overlap, their loyal friends who don’t get along, the unforgiven travesties torn from the wall no matter what promises are uttered past midnight, and that’s why we broke up.

  This is what I’m talking about, Ed: the truth of it. Look at this coin. Where is it from? What prime minister, whose king is that? Somewhere in the world they take this as money, but it wasn’t that day after school at Cheese Parlor.

  We’d agreed, with more debate and diplomacy than that Nigel Krath’s seven-hour miniseries on Cardinal Richelieu, that we’d have an early dinner or a post-coffee, post-practice snack or whatever you call it when it’s sunset and you’re really supposed to be home but instead you’re having waffle-iron grilled cheeses and scalding watery tomato soup at a place of neutral territory. They were tired of not meeting you, even though it hadn’t been any time at all. They thought, all of them, Jordan and Lauren, except Al because he had no opinion, that I was hiding you. Or was I ashamed of my friends? Was that it, Min? I said you had practice and they said that was no excuse and I said of course it was and then Lauren said maybe if we didn’t invite you, like with Al’s party, maybe then you’d show up, so I said OK, OK, OK, OK, shut up, OK, Tuesday after your practice, after coffee at Federico’s, let’s go to Cheese Parlor, which is centrally located and equally despised by everyone, and then I asked you and you said sure, sounds good. I sat in a booth with them and waited. The booths crinkled and the place mats suggested we quiz each other with cheese facts.

  “Hey, Min, true or false, parmesan was invented in 1987?”

  I took my finger out of my gnawing mouth and gave Jordan a strong flick. “You’re going to be nice to him, right?”

  “We’re always nice.”

  “No, you never are,” I said, “and I love you for it, sometimes, mostly, but not today.”

  “If he’s going to be your whatever he’s going to be,” Lauren said, “then he should see us as God supposedly made us, in our natural environment, with our usual—”

  “We never come here,” Al said.

  “We already argued this out,” I reminded him.

  Lauren sighed. “All I mean is that if we’re all going to hang together—”

  “Hang together?”

  “Maybe we won’t,” Jordan said. “Maybe it won’t be that way. Maybe we’ll just see each other at the wedding, or—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Doesn’t he have a sister?” Lauren said. “Think of both of us dressed together for the bridal party! In plum!”

  “I knew it would be like this. I should tell him not to come.”

  “Maybe he’s already scared of us and won’t show,” Jordan said.

  “Yeah,” Lauren said, “like maybe he didn’t want Min’s number and maybe he wasn’t going to call her and maybe they’re not really—”

  I put my head down on the table and blinked at a picture of brie.

  “Don’t look now,” Al murmured, “but there’s a ball of sweat by the entrance.”

  It’s true you looked particularly, wetly athletic. I stood up and kissed you, feeling like the scene in The Big Vault where Tom D’Allesandro doesn’t know Dodie Kitt is being held hostage right under his nose. “Hey,” you said, and then looked down at my friends. “And hey.”

  “Hey,” they all goddamn said.

  You slid in. “I haven’t been here in forever,” you said. “Last year I went with somebody who liked the whatsit, the hot cheese soup.”

  “Fondue,” Jordan said.

  “Was that Karen?” Lauren said. “With the braids and the cast on her ankle?”

  You were blinking. “That was Carol,” you said, “and it wasn’t the fondue. It was the hot cheese soup.” Y
ou pointed to HOT CHEESE SOUP on the menu and it got, just for a sec, quiet as death.

  “We always get the special,” Al said.

  “I’ll have the special, then,” you said. “And Al, don’t let me forget.” You tapped your bag. “Jon Hansen told me to give you a folder for the lit project.”

  Lauren swiveled to Al. “You have lit with Jonathan Hansen?”

  Al shook his head and you took a long, long gulp of ice water. I watched your throat and wanted it, every word you ever said, all to myself. “His girlfriend,” you explained finally. “Joanna Something-ton. Though, and don’t tell anyone, not for long. Hey, you know what I remember?”

  “That Joanna Farmington’s a friend of mine?” Lauren said.

  You shook your head and waved to the waiter. “Jukebox,” you said. “They have a good jukebox here.” You heaved your bag onto the table, found your wallet, frowned at the bills. “Somebody have change?” you said, and then reached across for Lauren’s purse. I don’t know a thing about sports, but I could feel the strike ones, strike twos, strike threes whizzing over your head. You undid the zipper and moved things around. My eyes met Al trying not to meet my eyes. The person besides Lauren who is allowed into Lauren’s purse is whoever finds her dead in a ditch and is looking for identification. A tampon peeked out the top and then you found her change purse and smiled and unsnapped it and dumped the coins into your hand. “We all want the special,” you told the waiter, and then you stood up and strode to the jukebox, leaving me alone at a shell-shocked table.

  Lauren was staring at her purse like it was dead in the road. “Jesus Christ and his biological Father.”

  “As your mother would say,” Jordan added.

  “They do that,” I said desperately, “with their friends, share money like that.”

  “They do that?” Lauren said. “What is this, a nature special? Are they hyenas?”

  “Let’s hope they don’t mate for life,” Jordan muttered.

  Al just looked at me, like he’d jump on his horse, fire his revolver, open the escape hatch, but only on my say-so. I didn’t say-so. You came back and grinned at everybody and, strike billion, Tommy Fox started to play. Ed, I can’t even explain, but Tommy Fox, I never told you, is a joke to us, not even a good joke because Tommy Fox is too easy a joke. You grinned again and spun this coin on the table, sputter spin sputter spin, while we all stared.

  “This didn’t work,” you said, pointing to the middle of the table, the no-man’s-land where this useless thing was spinning.

  “You don’t say,” Lauren said.

  “I love the guitars on this,” you said, sitting down and throwing your arm around me. I leaned against it, Ed, your arm felt good even with Tommy Fox in the air.

  “He’s joking,” I said. Desperately again. I hoped and lied, Ed, for you. This clattered to a stop and I pocketed it while we ate and stuttered and stumbled and paid and left. Your eyes were so sweet, walking me to the bus while they walked the other way. I watched them huddled together and already laughing. Oh, wherever it works, Ed, I thought with your hand on my hip and the not-fitting coin in my pocket. Wherever it’s good, whatever strange faraway land, let’s go there, let’s stay in that place alone.

  Look close and you’ll see the hair or two that came with the rubber band when you ripped it off me. Who would do such a thing? What kind of man, Ed? I actually didn’t mind at the time.

  Our first time where you live, where you’ll read this, heartbroken. Walking home with you for the first time, the bus together, after watching you practice. I was worn out, tired from not having my usual Federico’s coffee. Tired from being bored, really, in the bleachers while you practiced free throws with the coach blowing his shrieky whistle with the advice of Try to get it in the basket more. I actually dozed for a sec on your arm on the bus, and when I woke up you were looking wistful at me. You were sweaty and a mess. I felt my breath bad from sleeping even for that minute, the way it does. The sun came through the smeared and messed-up transit windows. You said you liked watching me sleep. You said you wished you could see me wake up in the morning. For the first time, not for the first time if I’m going to tell the real truth, I tried to think of someplace, someplace extraordinary, where that would happen. The whole school knows that if we make state finals, everyone from the team stays in a hotel and Coach looks the other way, but we never made it that far.

  When we walked through the back door, you called out “Joanie, I’m home!” and I heard someone, “You know the rules—don’t talk to me until you shower.”

  “Hang out with my sister for a sec?” you asked me.

  “I don’t know her,” I said, in a living room with all the sofa cushions pushed together on the floor like dominoes.

  “She’s nice,” you said. “I told you about her. Talk about movies you like. Don’t call her Joanie.”

  “But you called her Joanie,” I said, but you were off bounding up the stairs. The sofa gutted of cushions, stacks of distant magazines, a teacup, the whole room unsupervised. Through the doorway was music I instantly loved but couldn’t really pin down. It sounded like jazz but not embarrassing.

  I walked toward the tune, and Joan was dancing in the kitchen with her eyes closed, partnered with a wooden spoon. Chopped piles were everywhere on the counter. Ed, your sister is beautiful amazing, tell her that from me.

  “What is this?”

  “What?” She wasn’t surprised or anything.

  “Sorry. I like the music.”

  “You shouldn’t be sorry to like this music. Hawk Davies, The Feeling.”

  “What?”

  “You either have the feeling or you don’t. You haven’t heard of Hawk Davies?”

  “Oh yeah, Hawk Davies.”

  “Stop it. It’s cool you haven’t. Ah, to be young again.”

  She turned it up and kept dancing. I could, I thought, maybe should go back into the living room. “You’re the girl from the phone the other night.”

  “Yeah,” I owned up.

  “A friend,” she recited. “What’s your name, a friend?”

  I told her it was Min, short for etc.

  “That’s quite a speech,” she said. “I’m Joan. I like Joanie like you like Minnie.”

  “Ed told me, yeah.”

  “Don’t trust the word of a boy who’s sweaty filthy at the end of every goddamn day take a goddamn shower!”

  She shouted the last of this at the ceiling. Stomp stomp stomp, rattle of the kitchen light fixture, and upstairs the shower went on. Joan grinned and then looked me over on the way to go back to chopping. “You know, I hope you don’t mind, and no offense, but you don’t look like a sidelines girl.”