Out of Love Read online

  Then she even began to do some exercises. I could hear her from the hallway or our bedroom. “One and a-two—oh, God, and a-three—huh huh.”

  But that didn’t last very long. One night I came into her room to say good night and I watched her do a few waist bends. She was grunting and panting, and before she did six of them, she fell across the bed moaning. “I give up!” she shouted. “Fat is beautiful! In some primitive cultures, fat is worshipped!”

  “Ma!” I said. “Get up! You can’t stop now.”

  But she just lay there as if she were dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do. After a while she stopped using the eye makeup too. It lay in the drawer of the bathroom vanity again.

  It seemed strange to me that adults could be so babyish. Couldn’t she see that a little effort would go a long way? Look at Mrs. Marlene G., for instance, who went from a size 18 to a “svelte and stylish” 8 in only nine weeks. “You can put romance back in your life,” the ad said. It was right there in black and white, but Mother didn’t pay any attention.

  I called Maya. “Parents are impossible,” I said, after I told her the whole story.

  “You’re telling me,” she answered. “Mine don’t let me do anything on my own. If I ever get married and have kids, I’ll certainly be very different.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And I’m going to keep romance in my life if I have to sit on it!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m sort of talking to myself. See you tomorrow, okay?”

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING I met Maya in the hall near our lockers, between classes. “I have to tell you something,” she said, just as the warning bell rang for the next period. “I’ll see you later.”

  We wouldn’t see one another again until lunchtime because we didn’t have a period together until French at the end of the day. I wondered what she wanted to tell me. I guessed it had something to do with school, because we had walked there together that morning and she hadn’t said anything then. “Is it about ...” I began to ask, but she was hurrying down the hallway, dropping pages from her loose-leaf book.

  I could hardly wait until lunchtime, and I didn’t pay much attention in Social Studies, because I was thinking about Maya’s secret. Sure enough Mr. Haberman called on me and asked if I knew the date of the First Continental Congress.

  “Uh—” I said. “Er ...”

  “That’s not quite right, Teddy,” he said. “But you’re getting warm.” Mr. H. is known for his sarcasm.

  I looked down at my shoes and then I heard him call on one of the brains, who ran off the date as if it were her own telephone number. Why did we have to learn those stupid dates anyway?

  I looked across the room and saw Marc Singer looking at me. He was probably thinking what a big dope I was, and I looked down again, feeling my face get warm and red. Marc Singer is the best-looking boy in the whole school. He has blue-blue eyes like Paul Newman’s and this fabulous light-blond hair. Maya’s mother says that Marc has “bedroom eyes” and can’t be trusted. Trusted to do what? Well, it was certain that I would never find out. When the bell rang for the end of the period, I bent down, pretending to look for something on the floor, but I watched Marc and a group of girls leave the room together. They were laughing, and for one sick moment I wondered if they were laughing at me. In the novels I read, the popular, good-looking kids aren’t really happy in their heart of hearts because they always have some terrible secret problem, like a father who drinks or a mother who steals from the five-and-ten. But the popular kids in our school always looked very happy to me. “C’est la vie,” I said, under my breath, but it really didn’t make me feel much better.

  My next period was Health with Mrs. Ferguson, and when I got to her room she had everybody lined up, ready to leave for the auditorium. “We are going to see a film, girls,” she announced. This was an all-girl class. The boys met across the hall with Dr. Scarlatti. I always wondered what went on in that room. Every once in a while we could hear shouts of laughter. What could be so funny in Health? Mrs. Ferguson certainly never made anybody laugh, with her stupid charts of the human body and the ones on good nutrition. She was always rolling them up and down and pointing to the eggs and meat and cheese in the protein group, or to the digestive tract (ugh), which looked like a can of worms. Sometimes I didn’t want to eat my lunch after Health.

  The films were usually pretty good, though. Last month we saw one on drugs, with kids freaked out at a hospital. The month before that we had one about physical fitness that showed all the Olympic winners skating and running and high-jumping. I enjoyed watching it even though I can hardly get halfway up the ropes in gym myself.

  That day we went into the auditorium and took our seats while Mrs. Ferguson stood in front of the piano with her fingers on her mouth. “Let’s button our lips, girls,” she ordered, but nobody paid any attention to her. Friends waved and called across the room as other classes came down the aisles. A few spitballs and notes sailed across the seats.

  When everyone was seated, Mrs. Ferguson held both hands up as if she were going to conduct an orchestra. “Girls! Girls!” and the buzzing in the room finally died down. “Today we are going to see a film on—er—family life. If anyone does not have permission from her parents to view this film, please go to the back of the room and speak to Mrs. Wisnoski.”

  The hum of talk started again immediately. Family life! We all knew what that meant. It was going to be a film on sex. I figured that wouldn’t make me lose my appetite for lunch. No one got up and spoke to Mrs. Wisnoski then, but when the lights dimmed and the sound track made its first crackling noises, I saw a girl from the third row duck her head and run down the aisle.

  Then the movie began, showing a bunch of tiny, furry baby chicks and the broken shells they had just hatched from. All the girls said “Ahhhh!” and “Oooooh!”

  “The beginning of a new life,” said a very deep voice, like the one that announces the constellations at the Hayden Planetarium. Trumpet music played softly in the background. “How does it begin?” Then the picture changed and there was a baby calf struggling to stand up on pipe-cleaner legs and everyone said “Ooooh!” again. Then there was a basket of kittens and finally a newborn human baby sucking at its mother’s breast. One girl let out a funny whoop and other girls said “Shhh.”

  The baby was two days old. They showed the mother in her hospital bed, and then they showed the nursery with a hundred babies screaming and all the fathers just outside, waving and smiling and rapping on the glass.

  The mother and father took their baby home and then things happened very fast, the way they do in that commercial for Funny Zoo Vitamins that Daddy wrote. The baby is four years old, then ten, then thirteen in about two minutes flat. She is doing her homework in the living room while her mother and father read the newspaper. Suddenly she starts to cry. “What’s the matter with Sue?” the deep voice asks. A voice behind me in the auditorium whispered, “She has Ferguson for Health, that’s what’s the matter.” A few girls laughed.

  Sue wiped the tears from her eyes and continued to write in her notebook. “Sue doesn’t know,” the deep voice said. “Sometimes she feels blue for no reason at all. Sometimes she giggles like a little girl,” and there was Sue sitting in her father’s lap and giggling. “She’s moody, and her moods change like the weather.”

  And so on and so on. We found out that Sue’s body is changing. That hormones are causing new growth. She has hair on her body. Her breasts are starting to grow. There was “growing music” in the background: violins and rippling pianos. Pretty soon Sue is going to menstruate. I was a little surprised that they were showing this film to us in the ninth grade, because we had already seen one on menstruation back in seventh grade, only that was an animated cartoon.

  But there was a lot more to this one. Sue menstruated, and then she went to college and fell in love with a boy in her physics class. There was a scene with Sue and her boyfriend walking on fallen leaves across the campus toward the camera, and then the camera stopped and we only saw their outlines, and inside there were drawings of all their reproductive organs. There were Sue’s ovaries and a tiny uterus shaped like a pear, and there were her boyfriend’s gonads and all that other stuff. We saw a diagram of teeny-weeny sperms running around in circles like maniacs. Ta dum! The music got louder and louder. The next thing we knew, Sue was getting married. Her mother was wiping tears from her eyes. Her father, who had gray hair now, was shaking hands with the bridegroom. I wondered if any of them was thinking about gonads or fallopian tubes. I felt like laughing out loud and I didn’t want to. Only the dopes laugh at sex-education films. I tried to breathe very deeply instead, and concentrate on something else, on the dark shadows of the drapes behind the movie screen. In a little while the movie was over. Sue had her own baby nursing at her breast, and “The cycle of life continues!”

  I thought about Debby Goldstein and how her mother had shrieked and carried on when she heard that Debby was pregnant. The whole neighborhood must have heard her. I thought of myself all tiny and curled up inside my mother’s womb, safe and warm and without any responsibilities. Then the bell rang and it was time for lunch. It was funny, but I wasn’t very hungry again.

  Maya was waiting at the entrance to the cafeteria. “What took you so long?” she wanted to know. “Did you see that stupid film?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Gross. Positively gross.” But she was already opening her lunch bag with great interest and pulling out her sandwiches and an apple.

  “Well, what was so important?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” she said, pretending she wasn’t thinking about it. “It’s this boy.”

  “What boy?”

  “This boy in my Social Studies class. Bruce Cohen.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know him. “What about him?” I felt impatient and irritable.

  But Maya wanted to stretch it out. She took a disgustingly big bite of her sandwich and began to chew. She held her hand up, and she swallowed hard. “He asked me.”

  “Asked you what, for heaven’s sake?”

  “To come over. If he can come over.”

  “You mean, to the house?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, goody for you.” I sounded terrible, like a stepsister in Cinderella, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt mean.

  “So I have to ask you a favor,” she said.

  I waited.

  “I have to ask you, can they come to your apartment?”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Bruce and his friend Steve.”

  My meanness began to melt away like snow in the sunshine. Two boys. There were two boys!

  “You know my father,” Maya said. “He’d have a fit. He would sit on top of us. You know my mother. She would ask them so many questions I would faint. It has to be your apartment, Teddy. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “All right.” Trying to sound casual and as if I had to think about it.

  “So this afternoon at four o’clock. I’ll bring my records. I’ll bring my new Stevie Wonder.”

  Were we going to dance? God!

  “And I’m just telling my mother that I’m going to your apartment. Nothing else. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said again. I opened my lunch bag then and looked inside. It smelled like an egg-salad sandwich. I closed the bag.

  “What’s the matter?” Maya asked, her mouth full of food. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “What do they look like?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “What’s-his-name, Bruce, and his friend.”

  “They’re okay,” she said. “Bruce wears his hair real long and he has nice eyes.” I thought of Marc Singer’s bedroom eyes. Mrs. Goldstein would have a fit if she found out about this. Well, it wouldn’t be from me, that was certain. And Mother didn’t get home from the bank until five. They’d probably be gone by then.

  The bell rang and I hadn’t even touched my lunch.

  “See you in French,” Maya called. “Au revoir, Madame Bonnard.”

  “Au revoir, Madame Bruin,” I said.

  8

  IT WAS A GOOD thing the boys weren’t coming straight home from school with us. Sometimes Mr. Goldstein got home early and he had a terrible habit of looking out the windows with his binoculars so he could watch Maya coming and going. If you asked him, he’d always say he was bird-watching, but the only birds you ever see in our part of the city are big dirty pigeons who spot up the whole side of the building. Once I got it right on the head after I washed my hair and I haven’t liked pigeons ever since. My Aunt Marsha laughed and said it was supposed to be good luck. Good luck! I wondered what would happen if I had bad luck.

  Sure enough, Mr. G. was at his post looking down at us.

  “I can’t stand it,” Maya said. “I just can’t stand it.” She was nervous anyway about the boys coming over and she kept rubbing her hands on the sides of her jeans. When we were inside the lobby, we discovered that the elevator had a big sign on it: OUT OF ORDER.

  “Oh no! “Maya said.

  “You only have three floors to do,” I told her. “I have five.”

  “I hate the city. I hate this dump,” she said. “I wish we could move to New Jersey near my cousin Judy.”

  I felt a sudden pain in my throat. How could she say that to me, her best friend? If she ever moved, we’d hardly see each other again. We began to climb the stairs. Her father’s voice came down to us through the empty halls like a voice calling in a cave. “Maya? Is that you?”

  I knew she would have liked to say something fresh, like, No, it’s Superman. But she only took a deep breath and said, “Yes, Papa, it’s me.”

  At the third-floor landing, he was waiting for her, the binoculars still on a cord around his neck.

  We were both panting. “Oxygen, oxygen!” I cried.

  “See you later,” she said, turning behind her father’s back to wink at me.

  Karen was home from school already and a group of her girlfriends was with her. They had just formed a club, called the Drama-ettes, and they were going to write their own plays and perform them. I wondered where they were going to find anyone to watch, but I didn’t say anything about it. I warned Karen that they’d better stay in the bedroom because I was expecting someone and I wanted some privacy. She became suspicious right away. “Who?” she said. “Who’s coming? Is it Maya? Is it somebody else?”

  I decided to tell her and get it over with, so that she wouldn’t do anything stupid later, like yell out at the top of her lungs that two boys were at the door.

  “Boys?” she said. “Boys?”

  “Yes, boys,” I said. “Didn’t you ever hear of them? They’re the ones who grow mustaches.”

  “Boys with mustaches?” Her friends all stood around, gawking at me.

  “Oh, forget it,” I said. “Just stay out of the way.”

  That was something Karen found hard to do. We had to share a bedroom, and it seemed she was always there listening when Maya and I were having an important conversation, or whenever there was a telephone call for me. I was used to having her in the room at night, though, and I hate to admit it but I think I might have been a little lonely if I had to sleep by myself. Karen talks to herself at night, in a quiet voice. She tells herself little stories and acts out all the things she did during the day. I hardly listen to the words any more, but I like the sound of her voice.

  Maya and I needed the living room because the phonograph was there. I went inside now and looked around critically. I had never noticed before that everything looked so shabby. There was a funny stain on the rug, like the map of Africa. I plumped the sofa cushions and opened and shut the Venetian blinds, trying to decide which way things looked better. Finally I left them open.

  I went into the bedroom and found Karen and her friends eating from a tremendous bag of M&M’s. I ran to get a candy dish and filled it while they protested. I put the candy dish on the coffee table. Then I moved the ashtrays and magazines around from one place to another. I stood on the map-of-Africa stain and squinted until the room didn’t look that bad. The bell rang. I jumped as if a fire alarm had gone off. “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” I called, racing toward the door.

  It was only Maya. I looked back through the peephole at her, feeling breathless and disappointed. “Oh, it’s you,” I said, opening the locks and letting her in.

  “My,” she said. “It’s so nice to be popular.”

  “Well, I thought it was them.” I led the way down the hall to the living room.

  “I brought my records,” she said, looking around as if she had never been there before. Then she sat down stiffly on the edge of the sofa, with the records on her lap.

  Karen and her friends came down the hallway from the bedroom. They were all wearing some of the Avon makeup and they had scarves and ribbons draped around their necks and their heads. One of the girls was wearing Karen’s rabbit-fur earmuffs. “Do you want to watch our play?” Karen asked.

  “I told you,” I said. “Didn’t I tell you. that I want privacy? You have to stay in the bedroom. Hurry up.”

  “Who’s going to watch our play then?”

  “That’s not my problem,” I said. “Just take your stupid play and go back in the bedroom.”

  They all turned around except for the kid wearing earmuffs. She probably couldn’t hear so well with them on. Karen poked her and she followed them.

  As soon as the bedroom door closed behind them, the doorbell rang again. Maya and I looked at each other. “You get it,” I said.

  “It’s your house, Teddy.”

  I went down the hallway and opened the peephole. A finger wriggled at me like a worm. And then an eye came into view.

  “Who’s there?” I said.

  “It’s us. Bruce and Steve.”

  I opened the locks and they came in. Bruce had long hair all right and his eyes were okay, but they were nothing like Marc Singer’s. He was very, very tall and he walked stooped over as if he were cold. Steve, the other boy, was about an inch shorter than me, and he was pretty fat. I thought I had seen them a few times walking in the halls at school. I wondered what we would do with them now that they were really here. And they didn’t help much. They came into the living room and sat down next to each other on the sofa. Bruce began to eat the M&M’s and Steve stared at the stain on the rug.