Why We Broke Up Read online

  “Hey,” you said, “I mean, good morning.”

  “Hey,” I said. I made a motion with my wet face, like let’s just pretend we kissed.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “What? How early it is. What did you think?”

  “Well, this is the thing with Tip Top Goods. It’s magical, but the hours are like, undead. Saturdays only, seven thirty to nine AM.”

  “So you’ve been there before?”

  “Just once.”

  “With Al.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Nothing. It’s just—”

  “What?”

  “You gave me a hard time last night, with Jillian.”

  “Yelling at me all drunk, yeah.”

  “But you talk about Al all the time and I’m not supposed to get jealous, I’m just saying.”

  “Jealous? I never went out with Al. He’s a friend, just friends. It’s different.”

  “OK, not jealous, but not even feel weird about it, I guess is what I mean.”

  “Because he’s not, he wasn’t a boyfriend.”

  “If he’s not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It’s boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.”

  “What? Where did you learn that?”

  You gave me a cranky smile. I stopped gripping the coffees so hard, let the umbrella clatter into my lap. “Hellman High School,” you said.

  “Well, those aren’t the choices,” I said. “There’s friends.”

  “OK.”

  “OK, so—”

  “What?”

  “What—why—”

  “Why am I acting like this?”

  I braced myself, almost closed my eyes. “Yeah.”

  You gave me a sighing smile. “Tired, I guess. It’s early.”

  “OK, that’s why I brought you coffee.”

  “I don’t drink coffee.”

  I had to stare at you a sec. “What?”

  You shrugged and spun the wheel. “Never got into it.”

  “Into it? Have you ever had coffee?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  You stopped at the yellow light, peered out at the world between swipes of the wipers. I took a sip of mine. It was early for me too. I’d just had time to shower and scrawl a going out to my mom, luckily I’d thought to choose my clothes when we finally said good night and I paced around my room thinking about us. “No,” you said finally. “I mean, not really. Yes, sips, of course I’ve had it. But I always, I mean I never liked it, so when everyone’s having it, I—” You sighed with your teeth showing.

  “What?”

  “I throw it out.”

  I smiled at you.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You do that with beer.”

  “I know.”

  “And anyway, Coach says coffee’s bad for you.”

  “Unlike drinking every weekend.”

  “It stunts your growth.”

  “You’re on the basketball team.”

  “And you can get addicted to caffeine.”

  “Yeah,” I said with another sip, “you see them living under the overpass, caffeine addicts.”

  “Come on! And it tastes gross.”

  “How do you know? You pour it out. Listen, don’t you feel awful tired?”

  “Yes, I said already.”

  “Then try this. Extra cream, three sugars, the way I do it.”

  “What? No. Black.”

  “You don’t drink coffee, you just said.”

  “I still know that. Black, any other way is for girls and fags.”

  “Ed,” I said. “Look at me.”

  You looked at me, your chin unshaven, hair only sort-of combed, the morning gray and speckled behind you, also beautiful. I tried to sort you out. “You. Must. Stop. With the fag stuff.”

  “Min—”

  “Join the twenty-first century.”

  “OK, OK, joining.”

  “Particularly with Al, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Because he’s not.”

  “OK, I said.”

  “And people have said that forever about him.”

  “Then he should stop putting cream in his coffee.”

  “Ed.”

  “OK, OK, OK, sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  “This is complicated enough without you insulting my friend over and over.”

  “Min—”

  “And don’t, don’t, don’t say no offense.”

  “What I was going to say was—what’s complicated?”

  “You know.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “This. Me with you, and all the different things. Going to a bonfire, out of place, and now you doing something you don’t really want to, just for me. It’s like a Portuguese vampire movie.”

  “What?”

  “We’re different, Ed.”

  “That’s what I keep saying. And I keep saying I like it. I want to go here, Min. Just, you know, ten thirty would be fine. I’m tired, is all.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Really, really tired. You kept me up late.”

  With a shish, your tires, Joan’s tires you were driving, rolled through a puddle. I smiled at you, loved you then, bit my lip to keep from saying it. “But it was worth it,” you said.

  I kissed you.

  “Was that our first fight?”

  I kissed you again.

  “You taste good.”

  I laughed. “Well, that’s coffee with extra cream and three sugars.”

  “OK, give me it, if it tastes like it.”

  I handed it over. You took it and sipped, and then sipped and blinked. Then, a big, big sip.

  “I told you.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Right?”

  “This is—”

  “Life-giving brew, is what Al and I call it.”

  “Fucking delish, I don’t care it’s a faggy word, oops, sorry, no offense, sorry again. Delish! Criminy! This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.”

  “Wait till the caffeine hits.”

  “I’m going to have this every morning of my life, and I’m going to shout Min was right and I was wrong! when I do.”

  You actually shouted it. I wonder if you say that every morning now, Ed. I mean I don’t wonder, I know you don’t, but I hope you think it as you don’t. Do you? Don’t you?

  “So,” you said, nodding as I pointed the turn, “did you buy Al life-breathing brew when you took him to this crazy place?”

  “Life-giving. Probably. We’d been up all night, the only way to get Al up at this hour.”

  “The only way to get anyone up. What did you do all night?”

  “Actually, he took me to an orgy.”

  Your turn signal: blinka blinka blinka.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I mostly slept with girls there. A large pile of naked girls all having sex at an orgy. Of course, I know you don’t like to think about that, because you’re homophobic.”

  “OK, you’re kidding.”

  “And Al slept with all your girlfriends, and they all said they liked him better.”

  You swatted me, and I shrieked at the small splash of coffee that landed on my collar. It never came out.

  “You know,” you said, “I’m not always sure if you’re kidding or if you’re mad at me or anything.”

  “I know, Ed.”

  “I didn’t know girls, or anyone, talked this way. Is that why—is that what you meant, complicated?”

  I ruffled your hair. The coffee was warm, soaking through to my neck. But I didn’t worry on it. You liked how it tasted. “I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I was just tired, too.”

  “Not now, though.”

  “No,” I said, with another sip.

  “Me neither.”

  “That’s the caff
eine.”

  You put the car in park and shook your head. “No,” you said, “or not just that.”

  “No?”

  Your head kept shaking. “I think it’s something else.”

  It was, Ed. We dashed across the street to Tip Top Goods, the umbrella tucked under my arm because I couldn’t hold it up and my coffee cup and your hand too. It was open, the nine stained-glass lamps in a row on the shiny red Chinese bench, lined up in the window, were blazing their colored fringy light to us for once, the usual sign of TIP TOP GOODS OPEN SATURDAYS 7:30–9 AM ONLY NO EXCEPTIONS gone and OPEN BELIEVE IT OR NOT instead. Inside it was a palace, Ed, all the parasols and taxidermy on the ceiling, the mannequins dressed like gypsies sitting on the opium bed writing antique postcards with pricey fountain pens, the rugs on the walls, the wallpaper on the floors, the owner spacing out with his hookah and his black beret, grinning at nothing, and right when we walked in, still laughing, this tome on a stack of silver trays, Real Recipes from Tinseltown. Like fate, was the feeling I had as I stood beaming breathless in the shop with this in my hands. Now, of course I see it differently, that it was not fate but fatal, fatal and wrong that we read the recipe and got excited and I shared with you all my dreamy plans. Outside it cleared up, as sudden and magic as a vampiric Portuguese sunrise with plumed birds and harps on the sound track. It didn’t last, it wasn’t clear for much longer, and that’s why we broke up, but when I close this book to give it to you, I don’t think about that, just us holding the book in our hands to buy it and take it here with us, because damn it Ed, that’s not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it’s why we stayed together.

  The sun blinked at us and we blinked back. Outside smelled like perfect leaves, the air clean and breathy, so we crossed to Boris Vian Park and looked at what we had. It was a magical thing, early enough for the park to hold a hush, the mood still and strange like With My Own Two Eyes, the scene where Peter Klay flees the identical twin inspectors who have been questioning him and hides behind the statue of some military victory, a winged woman on a horse, and a rustle comes from the bushes and slowly, slowly, carefully, a unicorn emerges and walks in a hushed calm across the misty lawn, and the story of the movie moves to some stranger place. I had that feeling in Boris Vian Park, that anything might happen.

  The benches were too wet, even after you did this loopy, chivalrous thing, sitting down and a ridiculous shimmy-slide all the way down, trying to dry it off with your cute butt in jeans, the caffeine from your first real coffee jolting through your body and making me laugh like a baby at bubbles. But even then I wouldn’t sit down, it was still too damp, so we soaked our shoes down the slope to the long curve of a weeping willow. I had a feeling. I parted our way through like you do—did—with my hair sometimes, and there we were, in a small green space dry and shielded from the rain. We slipped inside and knelt on the ground, all dried leaves and brown grass because nothing got through, just the sun shading down through the branches to keep us safe and hidden.

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” you said.

  “This is the perfect place,” I said, “and the perfect thing. It’s perfect, Ed.”

  You looked up at the light all around and then at me, very long, until I felt blushy. “It is,” you said. “Now tell me why.”

  “You don’t know—? But you just—we just spent fifty-five dollars on this book.”

  “I know,” you said. “It’s OK.”

  “But you don’t know why?”

  You were still looking at me, your hands trembling around the coffee. “To make you happy,” you said simply, and my breath was suddenly gone, Ed, with what you said. My hands stayed on the book, which I’d been jumping to open, now frozen with the joy of hearing you and not wanting you to stop. “Min, you know what I’m usually doing now?”

  “What?”

  “On weekends, I mean.”

  “This time Saturdays I bet you’re usually asleep.”

  “Min.”

  “I don’t know.”

  You gave a tremendous shrug, slow, like you were showing me how confusion works. “I don’t really, either,” you said. “A movie maybe, hanging out somewhere. Somebody’s porch with a keg at night. And games, bonfires. It’s nothing.”

  “I like movies.”

  But you shook your head. “Not these kind, but it’s not that. I’m not, I don’t know how to say it. When Annette says, she says to me, So how is this girl different?, the answer is always long, because it’s a long story.”

  “I’m a long story.”

  “Not like in English. I was trying to say it in the car, before. It’s just—look where I am. I’ve never been anything, anywhere like this with Jillian, or Amy, or Brianna, Robin—”

  “Don’t say the whole parade of blondes and whatnot.”

  “Whatnot.” You looked up through the tree, the last couple raindrops tiny stars on the way to evaporating and disappearing. “It’s different,” you said. “You’ve made, Min, everything different for me. Everything’s like coffee you made me try, better than I ever—or the places I didn’t even know were right on the street, you know? I’m like this thing I saw when I was little, where a kid hears a noise under his bed and there’s a ladder there that’s never been there before, and he climbs down and, it’s for kids I know, but this song starts playing….” Your eyes were traveling in the treey light.

  “Martin Garner directed that,” I said quietly.

  “Min, I’d spend fifty-five dollars on anything for you.”

  I kissed you.

  “And ask Trevor, that’s like a very big thing, for me, to say anything like that.”

  Again, again.

  “So tell me, Min, what did I spend the money on?”

  I scooted over to open the book, Real Recipes from Tinseltown. “Remember the lobby card you gave me?”

  “I don’t know what a lobby card is.”

  I put my hand on your knee, jiggle jiggle jiggle.

  “Sorry, it’s the coffee.”

  “I know. Lobby cards are, the picture of Lottie Carson you took from the theater.”

  “That picture I swiped?”

  “They’re not just pictures. On the back is stuff about the star sometimes, all their movies, awards they won if they won any. And, this is what I’m trying to say, date of birth.”

  You put your hand on mine, and we moved together to my leg, jittery too. “I don’t get it.”

  “Ed, I want to have a party.”

  “What?”

  “On December fifth, Lottie Carson is turning eighty-nine.”

  You didn’t say anything.

  “I want to have a party for it. For her. We can invite her, we followed her to where she lives, we know her address, to send the invitation.”

  “Invitation,” you said.

  “Yes,” I said, “you know, to invite people.”

  “I’ve never had a party like that,” you said.

  “Don’t say it’s gay.”

  “OK, but I don’t think I can—”

  “We’re doing it together, Ed. First off we’ll have to figure out where to have it. My mom hates me to have parties, plus it should be somewhere glittery, you know, glamorous. Music is easy, Al and I have some thirties music.”

  “Joan, too,” you offered.

  “We could do all jazz, that way it will all feel glamorous, even if it’s not accurate. Champagne if we can get it.”

  “Trevor can get anything.”

  “Trevor would do it for something like this?”

  “If I tell him to.”

  “And you’d tell him to?”

  “For you?”

  “For the party.”

  “For this party of yours, yes, OK. And then what’s the book for?”

  “The fifty-five-dollar book?”

  “The fifty-five-dollar book, yes.”

  I touched you. “The fifty-five-dollar book you bought for me?”

 
; “Min, I’m happy to buy you things, but stop with the fifty-five-dollar part, it’s giving me a heart attack.”

  “OK, well, I was looking through it while you were silly futzing with that samurai sword—”

  “Which was cool.”

  “—and it’s perfect. I mean, look at the typeface they use here. Appetizers.”

  “I don’t know what typeface is.”

  “Font.”

  “OK.”

  “OK, so the whole book has recipes from movie stars. And look what I opened to, first thing.”

  “It looks like an igloo.”

  “It is an igloo. It’s Will Ringer’s recipe, Greta’s Cubed-Egg Igloo, inspired by Greta in the Wild!”

  “That’s—”

  “—our first date, right. The movie we saw.”

  You held my face instead of a kiss. It was so still in there, except for your breath, sour and coffee-quick. “So we’re going to make that crazy thing?”

  “Not just that,” I said, and flipped pages. “Look at this.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, wow, right? Lottie Carson’s Stolen-Sugar Pensieri Sweets. These delectables, says America’s Cinematic Lovely, were born from necessity, growing up as she did with not two dimes to rub together. ‘My mother, bless her heart, would do anything to keep the nine of us fed and happy, and when times were tight, she’d snitch sugar from Mrs. Gunderson’s bridge club. The old bat hired her to clean up after their get-togethers, and my mother would empty the sugar bowl into her purse, go to Saint Boniface’s and confess, and then whip up a batch of these, waiting piping hot when we got home from school. The icing is made with Pensieri, a liqueur Poppa allowed himself every Friday. Father, forgive me—these just don’t taste as snappy if the sugar’s not stolen!’ ”

  Your grin was wicked and cute. “So we’re going to steal sugar,” you said.

  “Will you? Can we?”

  “Sure, there’s that diner near here. Lopsided’s. But it’s in those big things.”

  I looked us over. “Thrifty Thrift should have a coat, like an overcoat for five dollars. I’ll buy that for you, with nice deep pockets. You need another coat anyway, Ed. You can’t dress up like a basketball player every day in that jacket.”