Out of Love Read online

  Amour, I thought sadly. Love. Because of that Daddy wasn’t home with us, where he belonged.

  3

  DADDY AND SHELLEY LIVE in an apartment on the east side of the city. It’s very modern and fancy and tidy, like those model homes we used to visit on Sundays in the old days. I can’t figure out how she gets Daddy to keep his things so neat. When he lived with us, he always left a trail of newspapers, one slipper or sock, or his pipe with dead ashes spilling out onto a table.

  It hardly looks like anyone lives there at all. But they do. Daddy’s clothes are in the closets and drawers. Shelley’s perfumes are on a mirrored tray in the bedroom. There are shining pots and pans in the cupboards and all sorts of fancy foods, like truffles imported from France and baby Belgian carrots in a small jar. The first time I saw them I said, “Oh, I never knew that carrots had babies! Ha ha!” Which was sort of stupid. But somehow it always helped to make jokes when I was there. Not that Shelley isn’t nice to me, and to Karen too. I shouldn’t hate her. Everyone told me that, especially Mother. “She is part of Daddy’s life now,” Mother said, with a fake smile on her face.

  Shelley is something like the Avon lady. She’s young and very pretty and she smells lovely, as if she’s just taken a bubble bath. After we visit, Karen becomes Karen-Aurora, that sophisticated young housewife who talks about matching curtains and bedspreads, and how to make darling piggy banks out of old Clorox bottles. But after visiting, I don’t feel like talking at all, or even thinking; thinking about that kitchen where Daddy eats breakfast now under the big moon of a modern lantern, or that bathroom where his electric razor buzzes in the morning, and worst of all, the bed where he lies down at night next to beautiful Shelley.

  One Sunday we came home and Mother was putting colorless nail polish on the runs in a pair of pantyhose stretched over her hand.

  “Oh, how could you?” Karen-Aurora asked.

  “Nobody sees the runs under my pantsuits,” Mother said, “if I stop them before they go down to my feet.”

  “Ugh,” Karen-Aurora said.

  “Well, if I do it while they’re still on my legs, they get stuck to the hair and it’s murder when I have to pull them off.”

  “Horrid.”

  “Well, a penny saved is a penny earned, as the saying goes,” Mother said, in that cheerful voice of hers.

  “I’m never going to pinch pennies. I’m going to marry a millionaire,” Karen said.

  “Congratulations!” Mother shook her hand.

  “Oh, you would!” I said furiously.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Karen wanted to know.

  But I didn’t even answer. I went into the bedroom and called Maya on the telephone. “Maya? I’m never going to get married.”

  “Right on! Teddy Hecht, the liberated woman!”

  “No, I’m not kidding. It’s—it’s stupid.”

  “Personally, I agree.”

  But I knew we were both thinking the same thing at the same time: What if nobody asks us?

  4

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY I was sitting in my aunt’s kitchen on Long Island. Aunt Marsha and Karen were preparing dinner and Ezra was giving Mother an intelligence test. It was very peaceful there without the city noises, and with the sun slanting in across the window boxes of herbs and flowers.

  Whenever I feel bad about the divorce, about marriage in general, thinking of Aunt Marsha and Uncle Eddie makes me feel better. Even though Maya’s parents are still married, they don’t really seem happy, with all their spying and complaining. When they talk to each other, one of them always sounds bossy and the other always whines. Were they ever in love? Did they ever say beautiful and poetic things to one another? If not, why did they get married in the first place? Maybe having children was what spoiled marriages. But there were Aunt Marsha and Uncle Eddie, who were happy, who did love one another. They even said so out loud, in front of everybody. Ezra called them the Cornball Lovers, because they blew kisses across the room and had silly pet names: Dumpling and Poops and Sweetie Pie. It was so confusing. I sighed and tried not to think about love at all.

  Ezra was giving Mother instructions. “Now I’m going to say some numbers. After I’m finished, I want you to say the same numbers after me. Are you ready, Aunt Jean?”

  “Ready.”

  “Okay. 1-8-5-3.”

  “1-8-5-3.”

  “Good! Now try 3-6-8-4.”

  “3-6-8-4.”

  Aunt Marsha was chopping onions at the sink and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Oh, my God, I hate these things,” she said.

  “Mother!” Ezra warned. “We’re testing.”

  “Oops. Forgive me, Ez. I forgot. But I’d like a few minutes to talk to my baby sister. I hardly ever get to see her.”

  Baby sister! Karen and I looked at each other and smiled. Mother didn’t look like a baby anything. It was hard to imagine her as a baby ever. She was smoking, which she admitted was her worst habit. She was puffing on one of those low tar and nicotine cigarettes. We’d noticed that she smoked twice as many of those, so it didn’t make any difference. Ezra’s red head was pale in a cloud of smoke.

  “Coffin nails,” Aunt Marsha said, wiping her tears on her apron.

  “Mother!” Ezra said.

  “Sorry, master. I forgot.” Aunt Marsha curtsied and walked out of the room.

  Karen and I followed her into the living room, where Uncle Eddie was asleep on the sofa. He snored in a funny rhythm and his breath whistled when he let it out.

  “Sawing wood again,” Aunt Marsha said, shaking her head, but she looked at him as if she never minded anything he did. She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, without interrupting the buzz of his snoring.

  I sighed, wishing that my father were asleep on our sofa. Even if he sawed wood like Uncle Eddie, even if he was a little fat in the middle and getting bald on top. Of course Daddy never did look like that. He’s handsome enough to be a movie star or a model for one of those cigarette ads where a cowboy is enjoying a smoke at the end of a long day of broncobusting. Except Daddy has always smoked a pipe. And he doesn’t bust broncos, but he does do sit-ups and push-ups every day to keep in shape.

  I began to think again that my mother ought to do some exercises too, or join one of those figure salons where Mrs. Marlene G. of Bay Shore, New York, lost thirty pounds and fourteen inches in just nine weeks. “I am a new woman,” declared Mrs. Marlene G. in the newspaper ads. “You can put romance back in your life, too!”

  The magazines in our doctor’s waiting room warn women of “that age” to keep themselves in trim, “or else.” They tell you how to make the most of your natural good looks too. I thought of my mother and the Avon lady. Hopeless. All that stuff she bought was lying in a drawer.

  One day Maya and I fooled around with it when nobody else was home. “I look like an idiot,” I said.

  “No, you don’t, Teddy. Your eyes really have a nice shape.”

  “You look nice. At least you have blue eyes. That shadow makes them look even bluer.”

  “Do you think so? Do I have too much on?”

  “No. You really look great.”

  “You do too.”

  “I don’t. I look like King Kong.”

  “I look like Count Dracula.” She made fangs at me.

  “You look more like Miss Gruber,” I said.

  Now I went back to Aunt Marsha’s kitchen. “Try this one backwards,” Ezra was saying. “For instance, if I say 8-7-3, you must say 3-7-8. Would you like to try one?”

  “Sure,” Mother said. “I’ll try anything once.”

  “Okay. Try this one. 5-1-4.”

  “4-1-5.”

  “Good! Now this one. 0-3-6-1.”

  “1-6-3-0.”

  “Bingo!” Aunt Marsha cried.

  “Ma!”

  “I can’t help it, honey. I have to talk to Aunt Jean. Test her Monday night on your own time.”

  Ezra grumbled and complained, but he gathered up his pencils and pa
pers.

  Mother and Aunt Marsha began to set the table while they talked, and I wondered if Karen and I would be friends the way they are when we’re grown up. We’re not such great friends now, except once in a while when I suddenly feel very close to her. My sister, Karen-Bunny-Aurora-Elspeth. Maybe she would be famous someday. And marry a millionaire. I didn’t think that much of her dreams, but if they made her happy, I hoped they’d come true. And mine.

  In my mind’s eye my father was rising, rising in the elevator, a big bouquet of sweetheart roses in his arms for my mother.

  I sighed.

  “No mooning in my kitchen,” Aunt Marsha said, handing me a bouquet of spoons.

  I walked around the table, placing a spoon carefully alongside each knife. “Mother,” I said dreamily, “did you ever hear of the Venus de Milo Figure Salon?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m only thinking out loud.”

  5

  DADDY IS A COPYWRITER for a big advertising agency that specializes in television commercials. When Karen and I were younger, he took us to the studio where they do the shooting and we met that fat lady who crosses her eyes when her cat won’t eat and the man who eats like a pig and then needs Fizzies to “calm an outraged stomach.” Daddy is a group head, which means that he has other writers working for him, and he has to approve everything before it’s used. Some of the kids at school tell me how lucky I am because my father is in television. But Daddy always plays it down. He says it’s a grind and not what he’s really going to do someday. Because Daddy wants to be a serious writer. Someday he’s going to stay home and write a wonderful and important book. In the meantime, he’s the one responsible for that ad for Cavalon Shoes (“If the shoe fits, it’s Cavalon. Wear it!”) and the one for baby food that says, “Listen, your baby is trying to tell you something!” Then they have a lot of goo-ga sounds which are supposed to be a baby gurgling but are really done by a fifty-year-old actor. Then, “Translated, that means, buy Bubba’s Baby Food, for my sake!”

  Of course Karen thinks it’s very glamorous. She talks about getting her “big break in show biz” through Daddy. But who wants to be on television telling everybody how to keep toilets fresh and clean or which girdle makes you look younger than your daughter?

  Karen and I met Daddy at the agency one Friday and he took us back to his apartment to have supper. Shelley acted happy to see us, the way she always does. She kissed Karen, who kissed her back, but somehow she knew enough to just touch my arm and not get too close. She had prepared a wonderful supper. You could see that she had gone to a lot of trouble making little radish flowers and carrot curls, and Karen-Aurora wanted to know how to do them too. After the dishes were done, Shelley demonstrated with ice water, and I went into the living room with Daddy.

  When we’re alone, he often asks questions about Mother, about how she’s doing, and if I think she needs anything. Then he asks me about school and about Maya and the Terrible G.’s, as he calls her parents. He sits in one chair and I sit in another and sometimes I make believe I’m being interviewed for a job and I feel very cool and matter-of-fact. But other times my head is crammed with thoughts about the days when Daddy was home, about eating breakfast together and going to look at model homes on Sunday.

  Now Daddy asked about my different subjects in school, if I liked French and if I still hated Health.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” I said, thinking of myself sitting on the floor in the closet and reading the love letters to my mother. I didn’t want to look at him.

  “And how is Mademoiselle Gruber?” He always remembers everything you tell him, even the names of your teachers.

  “All right,” I said, looking fiercely at a flower on the Oriental rug.

  “Voulez-vous un bonbon?” he asked, offering a silver dish of chocolates.

  “I can’t,” I said, pointing to this month’s horror on my chin.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well.” I could see he didn’t know what to say to me, and I didn’t know what to say to him. It was as if we were strangers in a dentist’s waiting room, trying to make polite conversation. As if we had never lived in the same apartment, as if he’d never come into my room during the night when I was little and put the covers back on after I kicked them off in my sleep. If this had been a television play, I think the author would have had the father say, ‘You’re very angry with me, my dear, aren’t you?’ And then the girl would burst into tears and rush into his arms. She would feel much better even though nothing had actually changed at all.

  But Daddy didn’t say anything. He just tapped a little rhythm on the arm of his chair until Shelley and Karen came into the room.

  “Dan,” Shelley asked. “Do you think you and Karen could go out and get us some ice cream?”

  I guessed it was my turn to be alone with her now. But Karen didn’t seem to see anything wrong. She ran to get her jacket like a little kid being promised a treat.

  When Shelley and I were alone in the apartment she crooked her finger and asked me to come into the bedroom with her. She wanted to show me something. Then she opened her closet and there were lots of dresses and gowns and a double row of shoes. “If you want to try anything on, Teddy, just be my guest.”

  I only shrugged, not able to say anything. The clothes looked so lovely, all those beautiful colors and delicate fabrics.

  She pulled out a pale-green fuzzy sweater and held it out to me. “Try this,” she said. “I think it would be gorgeous on you. It’s simply not my color.”

  Little wisps of wool from the sweater drifted up and tickled my nose. It was beautiful. “It makes my nose itch,” I said, rubbing it for emphasis.

  “Oh.” She opened a drawer in her dresser and took another sweater out, a white one this time, with darling little flowers embroidered around the neckline. “Look,” she said, “if this fits you, you can have it, Teddy. It’s a tiny bit too tight on me.”

  I took the sweater from her and traced the outline of one flower with my fingertip. “I have too many sweaters as it is,” I said, but my voice came out all hoarse and funny, as if I had a sore throat.

  She folded the sweater and put it back in the drawer, where it rustled in tissue paper: I guessed that she had bought it for me in the first place and only pretended about it not fitting her. She was trying to give me something or make me take something from her, as if it was very important.

  Suddenly it was just as important to me to turn everything down, as if the acceptance of a gift from Shelley was the same as doing something against my mother. It didn’t seem fair, but it was up to me to choose sides. It would have been easier if she were more like a mean old stepmother in a fairy tale who plots against the kids in the family and tries to keep the father to herself. But she wasn’t. She was always thinking up little treats and surprises for Karen and me, and always inviting us to sleep at their apartment. The nicer she was, the worse it all seemed. She was the enemy, even if she was pretty and had such a soft voice and such a good disposition.

  And my mother ... well, she was my mother. I had to be loyal to her, didn’t I? And I could see that Shelley understood. She didn’t say another word about the sweater. She shut the drawer and the closet and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  But I couldn’t seem to shut up. “My closet is jam-packed at home,” I said. “I have to throw a lot of junk out.”

  “Yes,” Shelley said sadly, and I felt so bad that I sat down next to her on the bed. She reached out carefully and pushed my hair back from my forehead. “Do you know,” she said, “you have a very interesting face, Teddy. If you wear your hair like this, you show off your bones.”

  “My bones!”

  “Oh, good bones are everything,” she said seriously. “Not everybody has them. Look.” She took me to the mirror that hung over the dresser. “See? Structure is everything.” As she said it she moved my hair back again and I could see that I did look better, and older too. I peered in, wondering about my bones, seeing that
stupid pimple popping out on my chin.

  I rumpled my hair back the way it had been before. “Everybody wears it this way,” I said. “I like it this way.”

  Then Daddy and Karen came back with the ice cream, and he and Shelley looked at one another the way people do when they want to send messages back and forth without speaking. “I tried,” Shelley said with her eyes, and he smiled at her and squeezed her arm.

  6

  I COULDN’T GET UP enough nerve to say anything about the reducing salon to my mother, but I dropped a few gentle hints around the house. I left the newspaper opened to the page where they advertised about Mrs. Marlene G. and showed a picture of her in a bathing suit with her hands on her hips and a tape measure tied around her waist. I spoke about physical fitness and the program we have in school (which I really despise, since I never was a great athlete). I started leaving the Avon stuff out on the counter in the bathroom again, and one day I noticed a little blue shadow on Mother’s eyelids. It was hardly noticeable, but it was there! “Ma! You’re wearing eyeshadow!” I said, forgetting to be casual.

  “We movie stars have to keep up,” she said, pouring her coffee.

  “Well, it looks lovely. You have nice eyes.”

  “Thanks,” she said, crossing them.

  “And you shouldn’t always fool around. You should take a compliment graciously.”

  Mother put her coffee cup down. “Who told you that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I must have read it some place.”

  “You’re absolutely right, Teddy. When the president of the bank falls into a swoon this morning, admiring my eyes, I’m just going to say, ‘Merci bien, kind sir. Avon called.’ ”

  “Ma! See, you’re doing it again.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “I stand corrected. I mean, sit corrected. I’m going to try.”

  And she did try. She wore the eye makeup once in a while, and when Karen and I told her how good she looked, she said thank you without making a joke about it.