How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (2 page)

“You're not a priss,” I say. “You're, uh . . .”

“Go ahead, say it. I'm too fat to get a boyfriend.”

Let the record show: she said it, not me.

Paula flops down on a lounge chair like she's Camille taking to her sickbed. “What am I going to do? What kind of actress can I
possibly
hope to be if I'm still a
virgin
?” she says, grabbing me by the hand and yanking me down next to her. “Edward, you have to help me.”

I adjust my shorts again. “Uh, listen, Sis, I'm totally flattered, but I don't think Kelly would . . .”

“Oh, don't be
daft,”
she says, giving me a shove. “You've got to help me with Doug Grabowski.”

Doug Grabowski? Doug Grabowski the football player I convinced to try out for Danny Zuko? Doug Grabowski who used to go out with Amber Wright, the single most popular girl in school? That Doug Grabowski?

“What about him?” I ask.

“Do you know if he has a girlfriend?”

Paula's capacity for delusion is astounding. It's partly what makes her such a great actress. “Uh . . . I don't think so,” I mumble, as I try to figure out how to tell her she stands a better chance of being crowned Miss America than of landing Doug Grabowski.

“Splendid,”
she chimes, and she pirouettes onto the lawn in a manner that unfortunately calls to mind the dancing hippos in
Fantasia.
“I've got it all planned out: the four of us—you and Kelly and Doug and I—are going to go into the city this Saturday to see
A Chorus Line.
I can't imagine Doug's ever seen it and he must, he
really
,
really
must. If he's going to spend the
entire
summer hanging around us instead of those knuckle-draggers from the football team, then it's our duty, really, to expose him to the finer things in life, don't you think?”

“Well . . .”

“The poor boy must be positively
starved
for intellectual stimulation.”

“But . . .”

“Oh, Edward, it's going to be a night we'll remember the rest of our lives,” she says, thrusting my clothes into my hands. “Now all you need to do is drive over to play practice and ask him.”

“Me? Why not you?”

Paula clicks her tongue. “I don't want to appear
pushy.”

God forbid.

“Besides, not all of us have rich daddies,” she sniffs. “Some of us actually have to
work.”
She slips her tiny teardrop feet into a pair of pink plastic jellies and sashays toward the house.

“I work,” I call after her. “What do you call choreographing the kids' show at the workshop?”

She turns and points her pink feet, ballerina style. “I call it
play,”
she says. “Making calzones in a 120-degree kitchen while Dominick Ferretti makes lewd gestures with a sausage
—that's
a job.” With a regal toss of her head, she throws open the door. “Now get dressed and get over there,” she commands, sending me inside to change. “My loss of innocence is
depending
on it.”

N
ow outside it may be 1983,
but inside Aunt Glo's it's forever 1972: harvest-gold appliances and orange linoleum counters in the kitchen, shag carpeting and wood paneling everywhere else.

I grab a Fudgsicle out of the freezer and pad down to the rec room where Aunt Glo is ironing and watching
Guiding Light.

Imagine, if you will, a fire hydrant. Now put a black football helmet on top of that fire hydrant. Then wrap the whole thing in a floral-print housedress and that's Aunt Glo. She looks like the offspring of Snow White and one of the seven dwarves.

Aunt Glo is a MoP—Mother of Priest—and she expresses her gratitude for this good fortune by doing all of her son's ironing even though he's like forty or something. I plop down in the La-Z-Boy recliner, wrapping my towel around me so I don't get it wet. “Who's breaking up today?” I ask, trying to peel the wrapper off the Fudgsicle.

“Oh, baby doll, these poor, poor people,” Aunt Glo says, ironing and crying, crying and ironing. (Aunt Glo calls everybody baby doll, partly out of affection, but mostly because she can't remember jack shit.) “I just thank the Virgin Mother that my Benny is dead, God rest his soul, so I'll never have to know the pain of divorce.”

Even before her stroke, Aunt Glo operated according to a logic all her own. She is, after all, the woman who named her only son Angelo D'Angelo.

Sweat and tears mix on Aunt Glo's pudgy face and her crepe-y arm jiggles as she irons back and forth. Behind her, Angelo's collars hang clipped to a clothesline like severed doves' wings. “It's just so sad for the children,” she sighs.

Oh, please, not this.

I know that sad-clown-in-a-black-velvet-painting look, that sympathetic tone, that warm washcloth of pity that grown-ups are always trying to wipe all over me. What she really means, what they all really mean is, “I'm sure your mom had her reasons, Edward, but what kind of mother leaves her own children?”

I'm fine, I want to say, I'm fine. I have my career ahead of me. My art. My friends. Besides, it's not like I don't ever see my mom. True, I never know when she's going to show up, but that's part of what makes her so cool: she's a Free Spirit. Our bond is more spiritual than temporal. But still everyone treats me like I'm Oliver fucking Twist.

Aunt Glo keeps crying and ironing, ironing and crying, and we're quiet for a moment, which, being Italian, is unusual for us. My bathing suit is giving me the itch and I want to leave, but I want to stay, too. There's something kind of comforting about watching Aunt Glo cry; I guess because I can't cry myself. It's probably my biggest failing as an actor, but I can't seem to do it. Sometimes I'll try to force the tears out, pushing and grunting like I'm constipated, but I just end up feeling trapped inside my skin and desperate to get out. So instead I sit like this with Aunt Glo,
Guiding Light
casting shadows on the wall behind us, while she cries for both of us.

I back MoM (Mom's old Mercedes)
out of Aunt Glo's driveway into the cul-de-sac. My mother gave up the car when she left Al because she doesn't really care about that kind of thing anyway. My mom is all about Personal Fulfillment, which is why she took off when I was twelve to find herself. Al may pay for all my training, but it's my mom who really understands me as an artist. She always said, “If you want to be a garbage man,
be
a garbage man, but be the
best
garbage man you can be.” I wave at Aunt Glo's neighbor, an old Italian guy in Bermuda shorts and dark socks watering his tomato plants, then make the lethal left-hand turn onto Wallingford Avenue.

Now, when they make the movie of my life, this'll be when they begin the credits. There I'll be, breezing down suburban streets in my thrift-shop fedora while Frank Sinatra's “Summer Wind” plays on the soundtrack. It'll help establish the right mood of swagger and swing. Frank's all about swagger and swing.

What you see might surprise you. New Jersey may be the most densely populated state in the U.S. (or as Paula likes to say, the state where the population is most dense), but you wouldn't know it from Wallingford.

Colonial Wallingford.

Twenty minutes in any direction you'll find the Jersey you're thinking of—the toxic waste dumps; the wise guys who say
dese
,
dem,
and
dose
; the gangs, the ghettos, and the Garden State Parkway. But the moment you enter Wallingford the houses take a giant step back from the street, like they're too good to be seen near it, and expand upward and outward, sprouting things like turrets and gables and chimneys. Founded in 1732, Wallingford takes a disproportionately absurd amount of pride in its colonial heritage. The American troops may have camped at Camptown (or as we call it, Cramptown, because the food at the diner always gives us gas), and fought what was essentially an eighteenth-century version of a water fight at Battle Brook (the town over from that), but somehow Wallingford emerged as the epitome of all things traditional and quaint.

Wallingford is a bedroom community, which means that most people work an hour away in Manhattan and only sleep here. On the one hand, I find the term “bedroom community” sort of sexy, imagining that all kinds of otherwise respectable people are swapping wives and having orgies behind closed doors, but it probably just means that not much else happens in Wallingford beyond sleeping.

I get as far as Washington Street and sit for a moment behind the wheel, MoM's diesel engine chugging like a locomotive, while I decide which way to go. If I make a left and take it almost as far as the freeway I'll get to Oak Acres, the neighborhood I'm embarrassed to admit I live in. There are no turrets or gables or chimneys in Oak Acres; there aren't even any actual oaks, just sprawling ranch houses with circular driveways and phoney-baloney columns designed to appeal to people who possess more money than taste. Oak Acres is so full of Italians and Jews relocated from places like Hoboken and Bayonne that the Wallingford blue bloods call it Hoboken Acres. I turn right and head to the high school instead.

I pull into my usual spot, the one marked
VISITOR PARKING ONLY,
because I like to think of myself as someone who is just visiting a suburban New Jersey high school, rather than someone who actually attends one. When they make the movie of my life, this'll be where the credits end.

I duck in through a side door that only the Play People know about. (Play People. Like we're not real. We're the realest people in this preppy prison.) Revolting Renée, the choreographer, is onstage teaching the Hand Jive while simultaneously grossing everyone out with her noxious BO and backne. Her excuse for not bathing is that she's like some ex-hippie or something, but personally I think there's a statute of limitations on body odor as an act of rebellion. Some little ninth grader sees me and points me out to the other kids in the chorus.

“Okay, people, that's right,” Revolting Renée says, raising her scary Vulcan eyebrows, “the famous Edward Zanni has graced us with his presence.”

I gesture to the cast with a
grand port de bras.

“Let's show him what we've been up to while he's been lyin' around workin' on his tan,” she says.

Did I get color? Cool. Without a tan I look like I'm jaundiced. I catch Kelly's eye and wave to her. She peeks up from under her blond bangs and waves back in that shy way that pretty girls do—wiggling her fingers, rather than actually moving her whole hand. She mouths “Hi,” or “Hiyeee” to be exact, and smiles at me with both rows of teeth. She's wearing character shoes for dancing and the combination of high heels with tight terry-cloth shorts makes her look like a teen prostitute in a TV movie of the week.

It's a good look.

She turns her back and slides her thumbs under her shorts to pull them down over her Valentine ass, and I feel my cold, wrinkly dick stir in my pants.

Revolting Renée hollers “Five, six, seven, eight . . .” and leads the chorus in the Hand Jive, but they have a hard time following her characteristically inept choreography. Kelly, who's playing Sandy, spins across the stage, the muscles in her pale legs rippling like a colt's, and lands in the veiny arms of Doug Grabowski, who dances like someone whose foot has gone to sleep. (What can you expect when his usual mode of physical expression is knocking people over on a football field?) Doug wears a
PROPERTY OF WALLINGFORD HIGH SCHOOL ATHLETIC DEPT.
T-shirt, but since he's actually a jock it's not meant to be ironic.

He and Kelly look good together; so—I don't know—Northern Hemisphere, I guess. Kelly could easily date plenty of guys just like Doug, football players with necks thicker than their heads, popular boys who shout each other's last names in the halls and who mutter when they're called on in class. But for some unfathomable reason she chose
me.
It's like the high-school equivalent of Princess Di ditching Prince Charles to date a commoner. Like that's ever gonna happen.

I suppose I'm not bad-looking in my own way. My body's a little softer than I'd like it to be—my ratio of Twinkies to dance classes being unequal—but I look all right as long as I keep my shirt untucked; and girls have always liked to play with my curly hair and complain they're jealous of my eyelashes, which are long and thick, like a camel's or Liza Minnelli's. But still, Kelly is everything a high-school boy wants in a girl—she's thin, she's blond, and, most important, she likes to mess around. She was even a cheerleader back in junior high, but had some kind of falling out with the Rah-Rah's the summer before sophomore year and sought refuge with the Play People instead. Still, there's something kind of WASP-y about Kelly, despite her actually being Irish Catholic on both sides. After all, she does live in Wallingford Heights, a neighborhood so exclusive you practically need a blood test to get in or, perhaps I should say, a blue-blood test. I watch her do the Hand Jive and wonder whether we'll have time later for a hand job.