Engaging Men (32 page)

“I adore the East Village,” she said. “I’ve even done a show at one of my favorite performance venues there—P.S. 122.”

“So you’re a performance artist as well as a…a photographer?” I said, remembering the photo she’d had in that group show at the Smithsonian.

“I’d say she’s an exhibitionist!” Mr. Stevens said.

Apparently Mr. Stevens remembered that show, too.

Kayla ignored him. “Actually, I just did it the one time. Did you ever hear of the ‘Bare Your Body, Bare Your Soul’ show?”

Not only had I heard of it, I’d seen it. “That was you?”

“Oh, dear Lord, don’t tell me you patronize that smut, too!” Mrs. Stevens said. Even Susan seemed to have a little gleam in her eye, I thought, glancing up at the picture.

“Um, just the one time…” In truth, I had found the whole show a wee bit embarrassing, though I did admire the courage of the six female performers who’d gotten up on stage, each one of them completely naked, as they narrated tales of suppression and male dominance. The whole thing was a bit…angry for my taste, but then, I had shelled out $24.50 for a ticket.

I never seemed to gain my footing again in the conversation after that. And it seemed to go on for hours. Needless to say, I was enormously relieved when Kayla interrupted Mrs. Stevens in the middle of a diatribe about the lack of family values in the unmarried thirty and over set (read: me, Kayla and even Kirk, for that matter) by suggesting we take a ride into town.

“We’ll show Angela around,” she said to Kirk, who had already leaped up, clearly eager to escape. “Besides,” Kayla continued, turning to her mother, “you’re gonna need more bread for tomorrow anyway. You never buy enough.”

“Well, maybe if you kept your own intake down, we’d have enough,” Mr. Stevens grumbled, but Kayla had already snatched her keys and was heading out the front door.

“C’mon, Ange,” Kirk said, grabbing my hand and taking me with him.

Once we’d settled into the Jetta, I felt like myself again. I was starting to appreciate the sturdy German car, especially as it seemed to be the only place I could relax. “You okay?” Kirk said to me, touching my shoulder from where he sat in the back seat.

I turned and nodded tentatively at him. Sure, I was fine— now.

Though I secretly hoped “town” meant Boston (I knew it was close, but apparently not that close), I found I liked the charming little streets that we strolled down once we’d parked the car, though Newton was vastly different from the neighborhood I grew up in. For one thing, it was cleaner. Plus everyone here looked alike. And like they all shopped at Lands’ End. Or maybe Lee and Laurie, I thought, spying a familiar-looking windbreaker on a young woman we passed.

Kayla talked animatedly the whole time, pointing out the library and claiming she still owed them a book she’d taken out back in high school. “They probably have a Wanted sign of me in the lobby,” she said with a gleeful little giggle. Later, when we passed the bakery, Kayla picked up three loaves of French bread for tomorrow and a bag of cookies, which she immediately began popping into her mouth. My stomach rumbled, and I was contemplating one of those tempting black-and-white

cookies when I heard Kirk exclaim, “Kayla, Mom’s cooking dinner. And you know how early they always eat…”

Right, dinner. Couldn’t kill my appetite for the first family dinner. I knew my mother regarded anyone who ate meagerly at her table as bizarre. I didn’t want to make a bad impression if Mrs. Stevens was the same way.

Still, I watched with longing as Kayla shoved down cookie after cookie while she continued her tour.

“So what do you think?” Kirk said, when we had traveled from one end of town to the other.

“It’s…it’s nice,” I said, gazing up at his happy features. I could tell he was proud.

“Smile!” Kayla said, turning to us with the camera she had taken with her from the car.

I leaned in close to Kirk, smiling like the happy girlfriend I suddenly felt I was.

And hoped that someday my photo would be hanging over the Stevenses’ sofa.

But Susan was still there when we came back around four. As was Mrs. Stevens, who was merrily working on dinner while Mr. Stevens sat in a kitchen chair, listening to what sounded like Rush Limbaugh on the radio. “You’re back!” Mrs. Stevens said, smiling brightly at us from where she stood over a pot at the stove. “Phil, get the steaks out of the refrigerator.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy right now?” he said, eyeing her in disbelief as he leaned in closer to the radio, which he’d placed on the table in front of him.

Sparing her father a single cutting glance that he didn’t catch, Kayla went to the fridge and pulled out a package of meat from the refrigerator.

“I can help,” I said, going to the long counter that separated the dining area from the kitchen.

“Oh, no—you’re our guest!” Mrs. Stevens protested. Then, turning to Kayla, she said, “Can you get out the onions, too?”

Kirk had pulled up to the table and was already engrossed in the newspaper that he’d found there. “Damn Red Sox lost again!” he said, then proceeded to read all the gory details. As I joined him, I glanced at the headlines and saw the Red Sox had lost to the Yankees. I smiled to myself, imagining Justin jumping for joy at home.

But my happiness was short-lived as I sat there, twiddling my thumbs, while Kayla and Mrs. Stevens bustled about the kitchen. I took some comfort in the fact that the Stevens household wasn’t much different from mine, with the men lounging about while the women ran around like loons getting the meal ready. The arrangement always bothered me, though tonight I would have been happy to chop up a few hundred cloves of garlic rather than sit here like an idiot with nothing to do. And no one to talk to.

Finally Mr. Stevens was roused from his radio long enough to fire up the grill in the backyard and cook the steaks (men did the grilling in my house, too). Dinner was served shortly afterward, in the elegantly appointed dining room just off the kitchen. Though I usually wasn’t one to put a morsel of dinner in my mouth before seven o’clock at night, I was starving, having consumed nothing more than a glass of iced tea and a breakfast burrito all day. But when I cut into the steak Kirk had forked onto my plate, I was horrified to discover how red it was inside. Worse, the vegetable du jour was broccoli, and I hated broccoli, though I took a few of the funny little trees onto my plate to appear courteous. And potatoes. Lots of ‘em. I had to eat something.

“So how is everything?” Mrs. Stevens asked, beaming brightly at me as I cut up the meat into tiny little pieces in an effort to make it look like I’d attempted to eat it.

“Everything’s great,” I replied, digging my fork into those potatoes with something I hope resembled gusto. I looked down at my plate. “Your china is lovely,” I continued, studying the pretty plate. I wished it were edible.

“That’s my great-grandmother’s china,” Mrs. Stevens said proudly. “And the silverware is from Mr. Stevens’s family. Do you know my husband has family that harks back to the Mayflower?” Then, as if she hoped I had some equally compelling history to tell, she added, “I don’t think we’ve even asked you about your family yet…”

I put down my fork. Then, without even thinking, said, “So far as I know, my family can be traced all the way back to my great-grandfather, who came here from Naples and started a fruit stand on Delancey Street. Just under the Brooklyn Bridge?“

“Oh,” Mrs. Stevens said, as if she found this information… disturbing.

“Angela’s dad started up one of the biggest auto-parts chains in Brooklyn,” Kirk chimed in proudly, as if feeling a need to make up for my less than impressive paternal roots.

“Is that right?” Mr. Stevens said, his interest piqued. “Humph. Must be a tough business nowadays, what with auto manufacturers making cars that you pretty much replace after a few years of wear and tear. I can’t imagine there’s as much use for auto-part replacements as there used to be.”

I shivered, feeling as if Mr. Stevens had just foreseen the extinction of my whole family line.

“Does your father run the stores himself?” Mrs. Stevens asked, probably trying to find out if my father was more grease monkey or CEO.

“He did. But now my brothers do,” I replied. “My father passed away four years ago.”

“Oh, dear. He must have been young!” Mrs. Stevens said, raising a hand to her cheek, which bloomed with health, despite her advanced age.

“Uh, he was fifty-nine. He got…cancer,” I said, in answer to the question I saw forming in her eyes.

“Oh, that’s just awful,” Mrs. Stevens said, glancing around the table at her thriving family as if she couldn’t imagine any one of them getting so much as a cold. “Cancer is such an…insidious disease. They say it has a strong hereditary component,” she added, looking at me now as if malignant cells were multiplying in my body as she spoke. “Did anyone else in your family have it?”

“Urn…” I thought of my paternal grandfather, who’d succumbed to the dreaded disease when I was too young to understand how sick he was. Then there was Uncle Gino. Maybe my mother was right to worry about us all so much. Maybe we were all going to die young. And, worse, I thought, glancing over at Kirk, who had stopped eating altogether and was staring at me as if trying to decide whether he could see himself cradling my head through postchemo bouts of nausea, I was probably going to die alone.

Alone is exactly how I felt later that night as I lay in that pink ruffled room, cataloging the events of the night and cringing at the memory of all the polite smiles Mrs. Stevens gave me as each new fact of my life was revealed—my CUNY education (Susan went to MIT, which somehow Mrs. Stevens couldn’t help mentioning), my Brooklyn upbringing (which caused Mr. Stevens to go into a diatribe about the Crown Heights beating as if I were somehow personally responsible). Then there was my grandmothers love affair. Kirk brought that up, not me—he thought it was cute. Of course, Mr. and Mrs. Stevens were horrified. “A woman that age!” Mrs. Stevens exclaimed, as if my grandmother were prostituting herself rather than sharing a few harmless shopping sprees and hands of poker with a kindly old man who nowadays probably got his biggest excitement when he was dealt a royal flush. I was painfully glad when Mrs. Stevens suggested an early bedtime for us all, saying we had a big day tomorrow. I tried not to notice that Mr. Stevens headed in the opposite direction from Mrs. Stevens as we said our good-nights (apparently they kept separate bedrooms). Kayla had descended to the basement, where her parents had made her a bedroom when she was a rebellious teen and where she was spending the night, since her own apartment was in Boston and, according to Mrs. Stevens, too far for a young woman to drive to alone at night.

Now, as I lay in my own separate bedroom, I longed for Kirk, who was already snoring peacefully in his boyhood room. The clock ticked loudly beside my bed. It was only eleven. I never went to bed this early in New York.

I got up again and rifled around in my bag for my cell, with the hope of catching Justin at home so I could regale him with the events of the day, and even get a laugh out of it all. After all, it was kinda funny the things about me that seemed to appall Mrs. Stevens. So why wasn’t I laughing yet?

I looked at the phone and saw I had no signal. Where in God’s name was I that I had no cell signal? Maybe it was because I was indoors.

I peered out the window, into the darkened backyard where a table and chairs sat on a wood patio. I could probably get a signal out there.

Though I felt like a thief in the night, I tucked the cell phone into the pocket of my pajamas and crept down the stairs, cringing at the creak in every one. I felt a moment of relief when I reached the foyer undetected, then surprise when I found the front door unlocked. What was this, Mayberry? Didn’t anyone get their house broken into around here? It somehow seemed…inhuman…not to have to worry about such things.

I stepped out onto the front stoop and felt a bloodcurdling scream rise up in my throat when my foot made contact with a body in the darkness.

“Shh!” Kayla admonished, then smiled guiltily as she waved a glowing cigarette in the air. “I don’t want my parents to wake up. I’m sure you can imagine their feelings on this little vice…”

I smiled down at her with relief. “No problem. You just startled me. I guess I didn’t expect anyone to be out here.”

“Me either,” she said, looking up at me curiously.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the bulge in my pajama pants where I’d tucked my cell phone. I mean, I was sure Kayla could accept a lot of things about me, but I wondered how she would feel knowing I had a hankering to call another man in the middle of the night. Though Justin was only a friend, it suddenly seemed like an illicit thing to do at Kirk’s family home.

I took a seat beside her on the stoop.

“Want one?” she said, holding out a pack of Marlboro Lights.

I eagerly pulled one from the pack.

She smiled. “I knew you were a smoker.”

“I’m not really,” I protested immediately. “Only sometimes.” Only since I’ve been thinking about marrying your brother, I thought with a touch of panic.

She lit me up and my panic subsided as I took a deep drag.

We sat in silence for a few moments. And what silence it was. I don’t think I’d ever experienced such quiet in my life—and such…darkness, I thought, my eyes seeking out the front yard and barely making out the shrubbery there. It looked kind of spooky. I decided right then and there, I would never live outside of New York City. I needed noise, I need people. I needed. ..light, for chrissakes. Who knew what serial killer could be lurking out there in the darkness? At least in Manhattan, your weirdos were right out there where you could see them, for the most part.

While your New England weirdos, I thought, could be anywhere—or anyone. Could even be living behind a white-picket fence and dressed in Lands’ End sweat suits, I thought with a shiver, remembering Kirk’s parents’ attire.

As if she were reading my thoughts, Kayla said, “So how are you holding up against the old parents?”

“Oh, they’re not so bad,” I said.