Not Exactly a Love Story (19 page)

“You’ll have Biff drive you?”

“I’m going to ignore that.”

The terrible thing, as we hung up, I was tempted to call back and say
Yes, let’s meet at the dance
. Really tempted. We weren’t even getting along all that well and I wanted to do what she wanted me to do.

How strange could I get?

Mom and Mr. B were having a little breakfast negotiation.

Mr. B wanted eggs, and no doubt he’d have cooked them himself, but there weren’t any. Also, he liked Italian bread and Mom chose whatever looked healthiest to her. This week’s choice tasted like stale graham crackers, and if asked, I would’ve agreed with him. He made the coffee, as usual, and Mom had all she needed.

Mr. B made me take a few bucks to buy breakfast at a little corner store, and I left without weighing in on the debate. I was buoyed up with anticipating the fried ham and egg sandwich they made at that place.

I wasn’t cold once I started running, and my body didn’t protest so much, but until I got out there, my mind put up a lot of resistance.
Why are you punishing yourself?
it asked me.
What kind of accomplishment is this?

But I fell into something like my run-one-block, walk-one-block rhythm. I ran a little longer at a stretch. The walking breaks were shorter. There was hope.

I tried running slower. Maybe my lungs would hold up better. Trying it, I decided the idea had merit. Speed could be built up after I could run a distance without pain. Couldn’t it?

As I savored the ham and egg sandwich, I reviewed the run. Overall, I ran better. By the time I got to school, I felt up to jogging around the track a couple of times.

Biff was out there again, but I ignored him. I ran easily, I ran focused, and for maybe a minute, I ran fast. When the dean showed up, Biff left the track and sat out the next couple of laps on the bleachers.

But the dean didn’t have Biff on his radar screen. He only wanted to jog around the track a few times himself. Good for the old heart, like he said. Good for mine too, because he was demonstrating that all running isn’t done at breakneck speed.

He introduced me to a couple of the guys on his team as they trotted past. That’s how he put it, “his team,” and in making the introductions he didn’t tell them I was hoping to qualify. He didn’t say anything to put me on the spot.

It didn’t bother me that the dean was talking to me like I was a jock, like he didn’t know I was one of his better students and probably had never made a team. It was good he did most of the talking, but I was able to keep up with him as we jogged around the track. I was feeling pretty good.

The bell rang and everyone headed for the locker room—
another chorus of pounding heels. Biff was not in the lead. I discovered the tides were shifting for him, which, when I got around to thinking about it, might mean he had other things to worry about besides my gaining popularity with Mr. B.

“Hey, let’s have a look at the love letter, huh?”

There was some heavy backslapping going on. Odd that Biff didn’t look all that pleased.

“Yeah, you guys heard about the love letter our star player received this morning? No?” the team’s running back asked. His towel cracked like a whip and just missed taking the eye of an innocent bystander seated between Biff and myself. Said bystander went unfazed, being quite the towel-snapper himself, and joined in with his own brand of witty repartee.

He nudged Biff. “Been keeping it very much to yourself, huh?”

I kept my head down, eyes on my locker. But I hated that she’d sent him a note. I wanted to get off by myself and think. Last night we’d talked about the dance. Had she hinted that she and Biff weren’t over? Had my refusal sent her in his direction?

“One of those Chinese folds the girls are always doing,” the towel-cracker added informatively. “You could use it like a paper cup, but you have to know the secret of the fold to be able to read it without tearing it up. Guess he knows the secret.”

Ol’ Biff kept strictly silent, which was strictly out of character. But they didn’t leave it alone.

“Must be love letters are private, wouldn’t you say?” Snap.

“How would I know? How many love letters do you see me getting, huh?”

Mr. B walked into the locker room then, and everyone settled down. Biff was off the hook, though. He hadn’t responded to the towel-snapper and he certainly hadn’t added to the general merriment. He finished changing and left without saying a word. Hard to figure the Biffs in this world.

Patsy just happened to be hanging out in the hallway as I left the locker room.

My heart lifted a little. She had her next class with me, and I was fairly certain that Biff’s next class was in the shop wing, in the other direction. So I wasn’t entirely surprised when she came up to me.

And yet I quickly looked for a Chinese fold—I couldn’t even say why. Simply that I’d just heard about it and I had no idea what to expect from her, I guess.

But while I dealt with hope mixed with a kind of dread, I think I came off as if Vinnie Gold takes this kind of thing in stride, if girls hadn’t always been waiting in the hall, hoping to walk to class with him, it had only been a matter of time. Vinnie Gold couldn’t be overeager, and I let Patsy carry the conversational ball.

“I guess you’ll be on the track team,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Are we still on for the movie?”

“You don’t still have a boyfriend?”

She didn’t even flinch. “Ex-boyfriend. I didn’t really have one on Sunday, either. I should have made myself clearer.”

The implication being that she should’ve been clearer with me, but I wasn’t sure that was the whole truth. Not that I cared at just that moment. “We’re on for the movie,” I said.

“What time?”

“I’ll pick you up at five-thirty. It’s a walk.” I was a little embarrassed to have to be asked what time I was picking her up, but not mortified. Maybe Vinnie was so cool, he wasn’t into details.

What Vincenzo did, Vincenzo took note that on the other side of the corridor, Biff and two of his buddies were watching him with Patsy, one of the buddies jubilantly poking Biff in the ribs. Some buddies.

I was staring certain death in the eye—damned if you do and damned if you don’t—and I suppose that had something to do with my attitude. I glanced once more at Biff’s blood pressure gauge as Patsy started walking, and I turned to follow her.

I was kind of dazed. We were halfway to class, talking about the homework, before I thought of this: Patsy waiting for me in the hall meant the Chinese fold had been a breakup note.

Certain death.

I was in the middle of the morning before I noticed my head didn’t hurt. My throat wasn’t raw. My legs didn’t shiver with the bending of a knee, dropping me suddenly into my desk from a half-seated position.

I saw Biff again in print shop, but he was genuinely busy
there, and reduced to glaring at me in an ugly way when our eyes happened to meet. But now I’d had time to devote to thinking things over. Biff was in a tough spot, Biff was. He had suffered public humiliation when Vinnie Gold had defended Biff’s “woman,” and his problem now would be how to regain his lost standing.

The answer seemed to be obvious to Biff, I felt sure, but he had to keep his paws off me to stay on the team. Short of satisfaction, he would want revenge, and however lacking in subtlety it might be, it would be likely to take a dangerous form.

I didn’t need confirmation on this, but it came later that day. Biff caught me coming out of the restroom outside the locker room. As in, he filled the doorway before I exited.

He was standing right up next to me now, shirt button to shirt button. A kind of survival instinct made me stand my ground, even though he smelled strongly of garlic.

He poked me in the chest a couple of times, the kind of rough stuff a football hero thinks is playful. “You probably think I wouldn’t lay a hand on you again,” he said, like it was a joke or something. “Me bein’ your stepdaddy’s star football player.”

To tell you the truth, this surprised me. I hadn’t really considered ol’ Biff to be someone with powers of perception. It hadn’t occurred to me that while I was figuring him out, he might be figuring me out. That was rule number one
in all those self-defense books: Don’t underestimate the enemy.

“But it don’t really matter to me they make me ineligible,” Biff was saying. “I got no use for being pounded to death, and I don’t need to sweat the grades, either.”

This statement had a certain logic, but Biff lacked sincerity. He’d want to stay on the team so he’d get to pound somebody
else
to death. He’d only established that we both had something to lose.

Him, the football hero label. Me, my life.

Then somebody else wanted to come into the restroom, making the point by hitting Biff on the back of the head. He snarled and cleared the doorway.

I called Dad. Mona answered.

“I’ve got an audition for a Pillsbury commercial. I’m a runner-up.”

“Hey, cool.” It really was. Runner-ups had been through a couple of auditions already and had beaten the competition. I wondered how many other runner-ups there were, but I knew better than to ask. She was probably a bundle of nerves. “Keeping my fingers crossed, Mona.”

She called Dad to the phone.

I had to ask myself, was she the date? Nah. She was practically family. She’d come to our house on Mom’s invitation first, an actress doing office work to pay her rent. She sort of straddled the friendship line there—lots in common with
Dad, but she and Mom shared the deepest of secrets, office gossip.

“Hi, Vinnie,” Dad said, coming on the phone with a hollow sound to his casual manner. “What’s doing?”

“Got company?”

There was a pause, then: “We’re working on Mona’s audition, but I can talk.”

Mona? Or maybe he didn’t want to talk about a date while Mona was listening in. I read him some of the instruction manual we’d picked up at the aquarium shop, mainly because it was something he was familiar with. It was my opener.

We didn’t talk anything but fish tank until the last few seconds of the call. I felt his embarrassment that there were things unsaid—heard it in his voice somehow, I guess, while he talked salt levels—and it was enough to know he was. Embarrassed, I mean.

“It’s okay, Dad. The instructions cover a lot of this.”

He said, “Well, Mona’s waiting.”

He said, “Hey, how about next week I’ll come out and we’ll take in a movie? A movie and a couple of hot dogs, okay?”

“Tuesday night,” I said because it used to be our regular night when Mom and I were still in Forest Hills. Only as I got off the phone, I realized I’d forgotten all about asking his advice on my problem with Biff.

Vinnie Gold dressed carefully. Pants a trifle snug. Black turtleneck
under a heavy cotton shirt. A non-puffy jacket Mom found on sale. Vinnie Gold did a few dance steps across his bedroom. Very Bob Fosse. Patsy would know she’d been out with Mr. Cool.

Patsy must have been watching for me. She came out as I started up her walk. I stopped and waited for her, deciding that was how Vinnie handled things. She wore the latest Bloomingdale’s look for the suburbs, one my mother kept looking at in the catalog—probably called “Scarsdale Winter” or something. White pants, white sweater, white boots. She looked great.

I didn’t know what we’d talk about, exactly.

But Patsy got the ball rolling. Her questions had questions and I answered them carefully, disclosing only the facts
that made Vinnie Gold a stronger character. Vinnie Gold never worried about whether he made a good impression, never wondered if he had done the right thing. He was sure of himself. And when the time seemed right, he had a few questions himself.

By the time we reached the cinema, I knew every major event of her life, up to and including sixth grade. When we came back out it was dark, and we weren’t dressed warmly enough to fight the cold. We ducked into a diner for hot chocolate. I expected she’d fill me in from seventh grade up to the present, but she wanted to know more about me. She asked whether I’d left anyone pining for me on the isle of Manhattan.