Why We Broke Up Page 6

  “No?”

  “You’re more—” chop chop she searched for the chop chop word. Behind her was a rack of knives. If she said arty—

  “—interesting.”

  I made myself not smile. Thank you didn’t seem right for it. “Well, today I was a sidelines girl,” I said. “I guess.”

  “Hey!” She perked up bright and sarcastic, her eyes wide and the knife up like a flagpole. “Let’s watch boys practice playing a game so we can watch them play the game later!”

  “You don’t like basketball?”

  “Sorry, did you like it? How was it, watching him?”

  “Boring,” I said instantly. Drum solo on the album.

  “Dating my brother,” she said, with a shake of her head. She stepped to the stove and stirred and licked the spoon, something tomato. “You’ll be a widow, a basketball widow, bored out of your mind while he dribbles all over the world. So you don’t like basketball—”

  It was already true, Ed. I had already wondered if it was OK to do homework or just read while you practiced. But nobody else was. The other girlfriends didn’t talk much among themselves and never to me, just looking my way like the waiter had brought the wrong salad dressing. But it was so elegant and worthwhile to have you wave, and the sweat on your back when you all divided into shirts and skins.

  “—and don’t know music, what do you like?”

  “Movies,” I said. “Film. I want to be a director.”

  Song stopped, next one began. Joan looked at me for some reason like I’d socked her. “I heard,” I said. “Ed told me you were studying film. At State?”

  She sighed, put her hands on her hips. “For a little bit. But I had to change. Get more practical.”

  “Why?”

  The shower turned off. “Mom got sick,” she said, flicking her chin in the direction of the far bedroom, and there’s something that never came up with you, not on any night on the phone.

  But I’m good at changing the subject. “What are you making?”

  “Vegetarian Swedish meatballs.”

  “I cook too, with Al.”

  “Al?”

  “My friend. Can I help you?”

  “All my life, Min, for eons I have waited for someone to ask that question. I hope you agree that aprons are useless, but here, take this.” She went to the door and fiddled at the knob for a sec before dropping it into my hand. Rubber bands, you kept them there, every doorknob in the house.

  “Um.”

  “Put your hair up, Min. The secret ingredient is not your hair.”

  “Then how do you make vegetarian Swedish meatballs? Fish?”

  “Fish is meat, Min. Oyster mushrooms, cashews, scallions, paprika I need to find, parsley, grated root vegetables, which you can grate. The sauce I did already, that’s bubbling. Sound good?”

  “Yes, but it’s not really very Swedish.”

  Joan smiled. “It’s not really very anything,” she admitted. “I’m just trying something here, you know? Attempting is what I’m doing.”

  “Attempted meatballs, you could call it instead,” I said, with my hair up.

  She handed me the grater. “I like you,” she said. “Tell me if you want to borrow my old Film Studies books. And tell me if Ed treats you badly so I can fillet him,” so I guess you’re on a plate somewhere with lemon and whatnot, Ed. Instead you came downstairs with crazy hair and loose clothes, a T-shirt from a stadium show, bare feet, and shorts.

  “Hi,” you said, and wrapped your arms around me. You gave me a kiss and took the rubber band, ow, out of my hair.

  “Ed.”

  “I like it better, no offense, it looks better down.”

  “She needs it up,” Joan said.

  “No, we’re hanging out,” you said.

  “Yes, and cooking.”

  “You could at least put on decent music.”

  “Hawk Davies crushes Truthster like a grape. Go watch TV. Min’s helping me.”

  You pouted to the fridge and grabbed milk to drink from the carton and then pour in a bowl for cereal. “You’re not my real mom,” you said, obviously an old joke.

  Your beautiful sister took the rubber band out of your hand and dropped it into mine, a loose worm, lazy snake, wide-open lasso ready to rodeo something. “If I were your real mom,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah, strangled in the crib.” You snacked off to the living room, and Joan and I made the vegetarian Swedish meatballs, which turned out delicious and surprising. I told Al the recipe that night, and he said they sounded great and maybe we could make them Friday night or Saturday or Saturday night or even Sunday night, he could ask his dad for the night off from the shop, but I said no, I wasn’t going to be free all weekend, it was a busy weekend for me. My calendar was full, not that I have a calendar. You slumped stretched out on the cushions, what they were doing on the floor, with cereal and dumb TV I could see but not hear from the kitchen. Cooking with Joan like she was my sister too, kind of, simmering and warm and scented like pepper and sweetness and smoke, dancing finally next to her. Hawk Davies giving me the feeling, giving everybody the feeling that afternoon in your kitchen. Letting my hair down with my hair up, in a rubber band from your doorknob, and your shirt riding up as you hung out on the floor, your shorts loose and low, the small of your back I’d watched all day.

  Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

  I guess I was supposed to put this up, I guess it should have hung over my bed in a crisscross diagonal like it was X-ing out anything else: HELLMAN HIGH SCHOOL BEAVERS. And I guess I could say the reason it never went anywhere was that the Beaver colors of yellow and green clashed with what is over my bed, the poster of my favorite movie in the world, Never by Candlelight, Theodora Sire’s eyebrows forever raised in the poster Al gave me last birthday that took him forever to find, like she wasn’t going to say anything but that what went on in my bedroom was inelegant and unworthy of me. I didn’t put it up, didn’t want it up, should have known then.

  It might as well have said HELLMAN HIGH SCHOOL ED’S NEW GIRLFRIEND when I found it Friday staked in a slat in my locker, waving in the breeze of the stale vents like when the diplomats arrive in Hotel Continental. It took some wiggling to get it out, and I felt my flushy face grinning and fighting not to grin. Everybody knows that even though the pennants are always for sale on game days with the second-string cheerleaders assigned to hawk them desperate and smiley in the cafeteria, they’re only for freshmen and parents and any other clueless souls and for the girlfriends of the players who snitch them to give out like long-stemmed roses Friday morning. And people saw and worked it out. Jillian Beach had nothing flying at her locker, and enough people had gossiply seen me with you at practice that week after school to figure who my flag was from. The co-captain, must have been somewhere in the gasping, and Min Green. People must have asked Lauren, asked Al if it was true. They must have said yeah, just yeah, or maybe they said worse, I don’t like to think.

  And inside my locker, the ticket. You probably didn’t pay for that either. I don’t know how it works, with the reserved section roped off for friends and family, guarded by the boys from the JV team all fluffed out with the importance of their security jobs. Those tickets are long gone now, torn and burned into nothing and smoke. You told me later that you were sorry there wasn’t an extra for Al but of course he could come to the party after or wherever we went if we lost, but anyway Al told me he had plans, no, thanks. When I got to my seat, Joan was my date, with some biscotti in tinfoil, still warm.

  “Ah, a pennant,” I remember she said. “Now everybody knows what side you’re on, Min.”

  She had to yell to talk to me. A dad behind us put his hand on my shoulders, Be seated, be seated, even though the game hasn’t started I need a perfect unobstructed view of a shiny wood floor with girls and pom-poms jiggling away.

  “Go Beavers, I guess,” I said.

  “It’s the ‘I guess’ that makes it such a great cheer.”

  “Well
, it’s—” I wanted to say my boyfriend’s, but I was afraid Joan would correct me. “Ed’s thing. I’m trying to be nice. And he gave me it.”

  “Of course he did,” Joan said, and folded open the tinfoil. “Have some biscotti. I tried walnuts instead of hazel, tell me what you think.”

  I held them in my hands. Joan hadn’t been home the rest of our first week, leaving me alone reading in your discombobulated living room while you showered. Although you’d invited me upstairs. But I was afraid she’d come home, I didn’t know what the rules were, so I waited until you came downstairs still damp from the shower and we lay together on the cushions on the floor with the TV talking over us. I can tell you the truth, which is that I liked it better when you helped me touch you, running our hands over and inside your clean clothes, than when you touched me, so unsure I was about when Joan might come home and see us.

  “Are you going to the party after?”

  “Me?” Joan said. “No, I’m done with bonfires, Min. I go to some of the games, about half, don’t want to be a bad sister, but the parties afterward are his responsibility, I tell him. I tell him, no coming home so late he sleeps through Saturday; no not coming home; if he throws it up, he cleans it up.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “Tell him that,” Joan said with a snort. “He wants no rules and breakfast in bed.”

  You bounded out as they said your name through a thing blaring professional with enthusiasm. My ears ached from how loud they loved you, the ball you caught from the coach throwing it sideways, dribble dribble as if the whole place wasn’t roaring, and then a layup and it looked iffy from where I sat but it went in and the roof blew off the place and you clowned and bowed and beat on Trevor grinning and then, like Gloria Tablet must have felt when she served coffee to Maxwell Meyers and found herself screen-testing the next day, then you pointed at me, right at me, and grinned and I froze and waved my flag until the next thing was announced and you threw the ball hard at Christian with an impy smile.

  “See what I mean?” Joan said.

  “Maybe I can whip him into shape.”

  She put her arm around me. She was wearing something, I could smell the scent of it, or maybe it was just the cinnamon or nutmeg of cooking. “Oh, Min, I hope so.”

  The rest of the team was announced. Blowing whistles. I thought for a sec, for some reason, that I’d cry at what Joan had said, and I flapped my pennant to evaporate my teary eyes. “But if you do,” she warned, “or if you don’t, don’t keep him too long past midnight.”

  “You’re not my real mom,” I was brave enough to say, and then stupid enough and realized it was the wrong joke. Yours, your joke with Joan, but she frowned and looked out at the pom-poms. There was a silence, except for everyone screaming.

  “These are good,” I said about the cookies, code for sorry.

  “Yeah, well,” she said, and patted my hand for I forgive you, but that was definitely the wrong joke, “don’t eat them all,” and the game started. The roar and the boom was like nothing I’d known, even when I was a freshman and went to the first pep rally because I had the wrong first friends and didn’t know any better. The whole gym was alive with it, cheering and waving and gripping their friends, bells when someone scored, drowned out by screams, delighted or disappointed depending whose side you were on. Whistles and then sweaty slowdowns, glares, shrugs, long-armed gestures of aw, shucks when it was a penalty or an error. Everyone’s hands palm out on the court, the ball is mine, the basket, the point, the score, the team, the game, losing you in the skinny pack, finding you again, letting go of you to check the numbers up on the wall. It was a rush, Ed, and I loved the rush, stomping my feet on the bleachers to help with the thunder, until my eyes found the clock and it was only a meager fifteen goddamn minutes that had gone by. I’d thought maybe we were almost done, the air hissing out of me and the pennant suddenly a barbell too heavy to lift again. Fifteen minutes, just, how could it be only that? I blinked at the time to make sure, and Joan was grinning, catching me. “I know, right?” she said. “These take forever. It’s like the dictionary definition of hurry up and wait.” I’d lost track of you long enough that when I found you again my brain said, Why are you watching this guy? Who is he? Why this guy and not other guys, any other one? because there was something wrong with the picture I was in. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit. I was cut and pasted wrong into a background you could immediately—or, anyway, after fifteen minutes—see didn’t match up, was how I felt. Like Deanie Francis in Midnight Is Near or Anthony Burn as Stonewall Jackson in Not on My Watch, wrong for the part, ill cast. My backpack, I wondered—with homework and the Robert Colson book I’d loaned Al that he’d finally given back added to the weight heavy against my legs—would I have to take it with me for the loud night looming obvious ahead of us since the score had tipped overwhelmingly ahead? What to do with this pennant and its plastic stick to hold it, do you throw them in the fire, why did nobody ever have a pennant at a party? What was I, wrong, doing here in the gym, never a voluntary place for me? They didn’t even sell coffee and I wanted one, boy, did I want one then, ready to bash the exhausted mom and snatch her thermos of it. But there was no way to escape, out the windows too high and not even open, crumbs and walnuts at my feet, Christian’s brother leaning against me accidentally, Joan laughing with someone’s mom on the other side. You don’t leave; you stay. I thought I was keeping quiet, but gradually my throat was hoarse and hot from all my yelling. I spaced out and came to, caught you pointing at me again and hoped I hadn’t missed other times, you smiling up to find me only to see me scowling, bored, and eyes elsewhere. I tried, I tried again, waving my flag like a hostage. I gave you my spirit and you won.

  The score was a billion to six, and no surprise. Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of The Omega Virus when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote. The biggest ones for you, Ed, realizing as you victory-lapped that I should have bought flowers and hidden them someplace to shower them down upon you, now that the Beavers had won and, according to everybody but the boredom-stricken arty girl in the reserved seats who was fat from too many biscotti, saved the entire human race. I’m sorry—then I was sorry, but not now—but it was boring to me. “Not too late!” Joan reminded me as we crowded out, waving to her car as I waited for you to come out excited and clean, my brave boy with a new girlfriend, happy with your teammates. But it was too late. I had to stay and I stayed, knowing, understanding, liking none of it. Not until the other girlfriends slipped the pennant off the stick did I know to toss mine into the trash with the others. Then I rolled up my flag while they rolled up theirs, agreeing it was a good game, a fun time, a perfectly acceptable thing to do with my Friday night. I waited for you, Ed, to make it all worthwhile, and when you kissed me and said “I told you you’d like it,” that was the only part I liked. But I just kissed you, too, and let you hoist my backpack with yours onto your beautiful shoulders and walked next to you, my fingers sweaty on the scroll of the pennant, not knowing where to put my hands as we grouped up in the parking lot to carpool to Cerrity Park. What else could I do? There was no choice, as far as I could think. You won the game, we won the game, the party afterward, the drinking, the big blaze, and finally alone someplace too late, I had no choice, not from the moment I first saw this flag fly. I had no choice. We weren’t going to sneak off to the movies instead, just talk anywhere, someplace else. Not the co-captain, not that night, not with me the new girlfriend, and that’s why we broke up.

  This is like the truck I’m in, never thought of that until now. I’m rattling along in this truck, writing to you with this tiny truck in my other hand, Al next to me keeping quiet and letting me finish breaking up with you, holding this toy and wondering if I can say ev
erything about it, the entire truth. It makes me feel like an experimental animated film I saw as part of Annualmation Fest at the Carnelian, a girl in a truck holding a truck, inside the truck another girl holding another truck, etc. Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.

  Who knows where things come from, really? When we got to the park that night, the fire was already going, the hooting and hollering. We’d been in the back of somebody’s little car, scrunched and kissing even though there was one more person, Todd, I think, but not the Todd I know, in the backseat next to us. When the car stopped, it was something wondrous ahead of us in the windshield, the bright orange and the flicker-flicker of shadows dashing in front of it like a documentary about the lousy day coming up when the sun explodes and the human race calls it quits. But it was just the fire, and people running in front of it, drunk already or just wild and frantic and free. My face must have shown that I thought it was beautiful and gorgeous.

  “I told you,” you said. “I knew you would like this.”

  You kissed me and I let you think, wanted to agree, that you were right. “It’d be a great opening shot,” I admitted, staring out. “Wish I had a camera.”

  “I bought you a camera,” you said.

  “Slaterton spent money?” if-it-was-Todd said. “Like, his own money from his own wallet? This must be serious.”

  “It is serious,” I said, and reached across you, opened the door, why not, let that rock ripple the pond this weekend. Stars were out, even, and the air cold from one angle where the night kept watch and the wall of heat from the fire coming the other way at us. You stretched your way out of the car and there was a roar, all hail the conquering co-captain, from the party. Two girls had a stuffed greyhound, a hulking gray toy like a spoiling uncle would give, and threw it into the bonfire to spark and sizzle: the enemy mascot. The eyes gleamed plastic and unflammable, Get me out of here. But there was only another cheer and horns from arriving cars, and then of course the music sprang up, lousy rock as bold and dull as a giant potato. “Love this song,” Todd said, like it was unusually brave to like what was number one on the radio, and he started singing along, There’s a storm raging inside my heart, tell me you and I will never part, etc. The grunts who always bring the beer played invisible drums. Awful but perfect, I had to admit, I can see the movie with the exact same thing going. You held me then let go.