Read Other Words for Love Online
Authors: Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
Other Words for Love
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2011 by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosenthal, Lorraine Zago.
Other words for love / by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1985 Brooklyn, New York, sixteen-year-old artist Ari learns about
first love.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89692-7
[1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Family problems—Fiction. 3. Artists—Fiction.
4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Family life—New York (State)—Brooklyn—Fiction.
6. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R7194458Lim 2011 [Fic]—dc22
2009053656
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment
and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
acknowledgments
I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to those closest to me for their unwavering support; my deepest gratitude to my agent, Elizabeth Evans, for her dedication and enthusiasm; and my sincere thanks to all the people at Delacorte Press—especially my editor, Stephanie Lane Elliott—who contributed their talents to this novel.
Contents
one
In
1985, just about everyone I knew was afraid of two things: a nuclear attack by the Russians and a gruesome death from the AIDS virus, which allegedly thrived on the mouthpieces of New York City public telephones.
My best friend, Summer, however, didn’t worry about catching AIDS from a phone or anything else. She started kissing boys when we were twelve and wrote every one of their names in her diary, which had a purple velvet cover.
I didn’t have a diary. I didn’t need one because I had only kissed a boy once, in the Catskills during a family vacation between eighth and ninth grades. The Catskills boy was from Connecticut, and he turned on me after I kissed him. He claimed that I opened my mouth too wide and that I was
only a four on a scale of one to ten in the looks department
.
Don’t get any ideas
, he said.
You Brooklyn girls bore me. And I’m going home in two days, so we’ll never see each other again
.
That was fine with me. I wanted to pretend that the kiss had never happened. It wasn’t what I’d practiced on the back of my hand while imagining handsome faces from
General Hospital
and
Days of Our Lives
. None of those guys would have said I was only a four, and they definitely wouldn’t have told me to watch where I was going after we bumped into each other at the breakfast buffet.
What are you doing in there
? my mother asked later, while I was brushing my teeth in our motel bathroom and hoping there weren’t any AIDS germs in my mouth. And I didn’t tell Mom what had happened. She’d already warned me that bad things could hide in the most unlikely places.
Summer and I went to different high schools. I attended our local public school in Brooklyn, while she was a student at Hollister Prep, a fancy private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that charged tuition my parents couldn’t afford.
Summer’s parents
could
afford it, but that wasn’t why she transferred there after only three months at my school. It was because some girls were spreading rumors about her, inventing filthy stories about how she supposedly serviced the entire wrestling team and went down on their coach in his office.
Summer Simon swallows
—that was what the girls wrote in bright red nail polish on a bathroom wall. Then they Scotch-taped Trojan
Ribbed for Her Pleasure
packets all over Summer’s locker. That made her cry.
I peeled them off while she sobbed into her hands.
Forget it
, I whispered.
They’re just jealous because all the guys like you
.
This was hard for me to say, because I was jealous myself. But Summer stopped crying and even smiled, and I was sure that I’d done something good. And she did lots of good things, too—like not ditching me after she started at Hollister and became a member of its popular crowd.
Now our sophomore year was over and Summer and I sat on folding chairs in my sister Evelyn’s backyard in Queens. Toys were scattered across the grass, and Summer rolled a Nerf ball with her dainty foot.
“Eight whole weeks of vacation ahead of us,” she said.
I nodded and looked at my nondainty foot. There was a callus on my heel and a scab on my ankle and I needed a pedicure, but Summer didn’t. The sun bounced off her painted toenails and the long blond hair that was strategically highlighted around her pretty face. Her eyes were dark, she always wore flashy clothes, and she smelled of L’Air du Temps. She hadn’t been without a boyfriend since junior high. Her latest conquest was a Columbia University sophomore she’d met last September who’d taken her virginity by Halloween.
He’s nineteen, so it’s illegal
, she’d told me in a giggly whisper the next day.
Nobody can ever know
.
I knew. And I was jealous. Since she’d started at Hollister, everything had been so easy for her. She rarely studied, yet her name was a permanent fixture on the honor roll. She was good at math, she was a fashion expert, and she could recite the stats of every player on the Yankees. She lived as the only child in a palatial house in Park Slope. Even her name was perfect: Summer Simon, like a movie actress on a glitzy marquee.
I wondered if her parents had planned it that way, and I wished my parents had planned better. They should have known that guys would be more attracted to girls named Summer Simon than to girls named Ariadne Mitchell. I also wished that my mother was as interested in movies as she was in literature. It wasn’t a smart idea to name me after some dusty old book by Chekhov.
But Mom was a reader. She had a master’s degree in English and taught sixth-grade language arts at a public school. She thought my best friend was highly overrated. According to Mom, Summer was short, she was a shameless flirt, and she was totally manufactured—all dyed hair and makeup and fake nails. Mom said I had a much better figure than Summer because I was thinner and three inches taller, and
Jetblack hair with light blue eyes is very rare. You can thank your father for that
.
“Ari,” Summer said. “Patrick is looking quite gorgeous today.”
My attention shifted to Evelyn’s husband, who was barbecuing hamburgers at the opposite end of the yard.
Patrick was thirty years old and six feet tall, and he had blond hair and brown eyes like Summer. He also had a killer body. It was lean and muscular from lifting barbells in his basement and battling fires with the FDNY. I’d had a crush on him since we first met. He and Evelyn had a son named Kieran, whose fifth birthday we were celebrating, and now my sister was pregnant again.
“You’re so boy-crazy,” I answered, because what else could I say? Could I tell Summer that I knew Patrick was gorgeous and that whenever I slept at his house, I would press my ear against the guest bedroom wall to hear him and Evelyn having sex? I knew that made me a pervert.
“Take it easy, little sister,” Patrick said when Mom and Summer and I were leaving, but he pronounced the last word “sistah” because he was from Boston. He also referred to the sprinkles on Kieran’s birthday cake as
jimmies
and he complained that it was “wicked hot” today. He always called me little sistah, and I grabbed every chance to make fun of his accent.
“There’s an
r
on the end of that word, Patrick Cagney,” I told him.
“Don’t be a wiseass,” he said. “You criticize your father like that? He don’t talk no better than me.”
He
doesn’t
talk
any
better than you, I thought, sure that Mom was cringing at Patrick’s disgraceful grammar. But he was right. Dad did have a heavy Brooklyn accent, the accent that Mom had successfully discouraged in me but not in Evelyn. My sister’s grammar was as bad as Patrick’s, and she had the vocabulary of a drunken sailor, especially when she was angry.
She wasn’t angry today, when we said goodbye at the front door of her modest home, which was always messy and had wallpaper from 1972. Today she smiled and looked at me through her heavy-lidded green eyes. Bedroom eyes, that was what her high school friends used to call them. Evelyn had been as popular as Summer when she was our age. The boys in our neighborhood used to drool over her auburn hair, her delicate nose, and her pouty mouth.
“Come and spend the weekend soon,” she said, hugging me tight. I felt her swollen stomach and noticed the thin layer of fat that had settled beneath her chin. Evelyn’s face was still beautiful, but her first pregnancy had left a stubborn weight gain that she didn’t try to lose.
I never criticized her figure out loud and neither did Mom, who wasn’t in any position to criticize. Mom was thirty pounds overweight but she didn’t care. She would never give up her favorite Hostess chocolate cupcakes or her homemade Sunday dinners with roasted chicken and potatoes drenched in gravy.
Food is one of life’s simple pleasures
, she always said.
She lit a cigarette when she and Summer and I were in her old Honda, headed back toward Brooklyn. The windows were open because the air conditioner didn’t work, and Mom’s hair swirled around her head. It was shoulder-length, naturally auburn but now mixed with gray. In her wedding picture she looked like Evelyn, but her nose wasn’t as small. And now her eyelids were a little too heavy.
“Are your parents at home, Summer?” Mom asked from the driver’s seat next to me. I almost laughed. It was as if Mom thought we were eight instead of sixteen. But she believed that parents should be around a lot for their kids. That was why she’d become a teacher—so she could wait at the front door for me after school, so we could spend August afternoons together at Coney Island. She complained that Dad wasn’t home enough, even though that wasn’t his fault. He was a homicide detective in Manhattan, and the city was just so crime-infested.
“Yes, Mrs. Mitchell,” Summer said, and I thought she sounded like one of Mom’s students. Those kids were so intimidated by Mom, they practically wet their pants when her husky voice boomed across the classroom.
Mom stopped at the curb in front of Summer’s house. All the houses on her block had double front doors, majestic bay windows, and elegantly angled rooftops. Her parents were outside, planting flowers in the tiny square of dirt that was their front lawn, and they both waved after we dropped Summer off and headed toward home.
Our house was in Flatbush, and it wasn’t huge or imposing. It was similar to Evelyn’s—all brick, two stories, three bedrooms, forty years old. But our house was much neater than hers, and there was a statue of Saint Anne on our lawn. She’d been abandoned by the previous owner, and I was sure she knew it.
She’s the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary
, Mom said.
So we can’t evict her. That would be a terrible sin
. Saint Anne always looked like she was crying when it rained.
Evelyn thought we were nuts for keeping the statue. She also rolled her eyes and stuck a finger down her throat whenever Mom got religious. She said that Mom was a lapsed Catholic, a phony Cafeteria Catholic—one of those people who pick and choose the rules that suit them—and she wasn’t wrong. We only went to church on Christmas and Easter, and we never abstained from meat on Fridays during Lent. Once Mom even signed a pro-choice petition that a lady from NOW brought to our front door.
Women are entitled to their rights
, Mom had said after I gave her a funny look.
There are enough unwanted children in this world
.
Then I glanced at Saint Anne, standing there in a chipped blue gown with a gold shawl over her head and her baby daughter in her arms, and at that moment I thought she looked very sad.
“Is Summer seeing anyone?” Mom asked.
It was a few hours after we had come back from Evelyn’s house and we sat on the living room sofa, enjoying the breeze that floated through a window screen. Illegal fireworks crackled outside, and I was polishing my toenails. There was barely enough light to see, but I didn’t want to turn on a lamp because the darkness improved our plain furniture and hid the small charred hole in our La-Z-Boy. Mom had accidentally dropped a cigarette on the seat after she drank too much eggnog last Christmas Eve.
“Not right now. She broke up with the Columbia guy,” I said, thinking about Summer’s other ex-boyfriends. I asked her once if she missed any of them. She’d just shrugged and said,
I don’t think much about guys from the past. I’m glad I knew them, but there’s a reason they didn’t make it into my future
. It surprised me that she could be so nonchalant, although I figured she was probably right.
“So she’s actually without a boyfriend? That’s shocking,” Mom said, puffing on a Pall Mall. I wished she wouldn’t smoke so much. I wished she wouldn’t smoke at all. I didn’t want her to get sick, or to end up as one of those people who have to lug an oxygen tank around. I used to beg her to quit, but she didn’t even try. She was too addicted. Or too stubborn. Smoking was another one of her
simple pleasures
. So I’d given up on begging, but I silently worried. “She’ll end up in trouble, if you know what I mean.”
I knew, all right. Mom used to warn Evelyn about the same thing but it hadn’t worked. Evelyn told our parents that she was “in trouble” during winter break of her senior year in high school. Then she took the GED, married Patrick before Easter, and gave birth to Kieran on a rainy June morning.
Later I sat in her old bedroom, which Mom had cleared out before we’d even finished eating Evelyn’s leftover wedding cake. Now it was what Mom called my
studio
, the place where I sketched the faces of anyone who interested me. And I found them everywhere—in school, on the subway, at the supermarket. I only showed my drawings to Mom and my art teachers because nobody else understood. Mom noticed the details in an eye, the curve of a mouth. She believed that I had inherited her artistic gene, the one that drove her to write novels she never finished.
I could’ve been a writer
, she sometimes said.
Or an editor at a publishing company in the city
. Then she’d look at me and smile, pretend it didn’t matter, say that I was the best thing she ever created. And that I would have all the opportunities she never did.
I didn’t expect an opportunity to arrive so soon. It happened after Mom and I came home from the barbecue and I went to sleep in my old canopy bed that was a hand-me-down from Evelyn. I woke to familiar noises downstairs—Dad’s key in the front door, Mom’s footsteps in the foyer, a midnight dinner frying on the stove.
They were talking as usual, but I didn’t hear the normal words like
electric bill, plumber, that pain-in-the-ass neighbor blocked our driveway again
. Tonight it was something about a phone call and money, and Mom’s voice was cheery but I wasn’t sure why.
“Wait until the morning, Nancy,” Dad said.
“But it’s good news, Tom,” Mom answered, and then she was in my room, telling me news that didn’t sound good at all. “Uncle Eddie died,” she said, and I saw Dad out in the hallway, Mom beside my bed, and Uncle Eddie in my mind. He was Dad’s bachelor uncle who lived alone in a rent-controlled apartment.