Getting Over Jack Wagner (2 page)

“Hi, Mrs. Irons,” I say.

She nods, looking suddenly uncomfortable. It's as if by giving me the once-over, it's occurred to her how she herself must look. She clutches her flowered housedress over her pillowy breasts, while the other hand flies up to her red-gray hair and flutters there like a nervous moth. “Oh, I'm so embarrassed. I haven't even put on my face,” she says, then proceeds to touch her eyes, cheeks, earlobes, as if confirming that, without decoration, they are all still there.

“Mom, chill,” Karl says.

Mrs. Karl drops her hands and sighs, emotion gone stale and practical as a cracker. “Well, come on in,” she says. “I'll get you kids something to snack on.”

Mrs. Karl ushers us into the living room, then disappears. The room is filled with little things, thingy things. Ceramic dogs and blown eggs, commemorative plates and spoons, a revolving brass clock, wooden dolls stacked one inside the other—things that strike me as eccentric and pointless and yet, oddly familiar. Karl and I each sink onto a daisy-patterned ottoman. I pull my knees and elbows in tight to my body, afraid I might send something crashing to the floor.

“It's a good thing you caught me,” Mrs. Karl is calling from what I assume is the kitchen, to the tune of crumpling plastic and thumping cabinet doors. “I was just getting ready to go to the store. Your father's out golfing with Larry Harris, even though I told him he'll catch cold in the rain.”

“Uh huh,” Karl replies. He is watching me without blinking. It's the slightly unnerving expression Karl gets when he's preparing to kiss me. Karl is a hard-core kisser. When he leans in, I take a breath.

“But you know he never listens to me. He's always sneaking potato chips after I'm in bed. Does he think I don't
see
the crumbs in the morning? And the Krimpets in the basement. Does he think I don't know about those? He has a mole on his back he won't get checked, and he stands so close to the microwave it's like he
wants
radiation poisoning.”

If there's anything more unnerving than kissing Karl, it's kissing Karl with his mother not ten feet away. In general, kissing Karl is pretty repulsive: too wet and too overt. And yet, there's some strange satisfaction in it. Afterward, I always feel as though I've been through some kind of taxing team sport: a moment's disorientation, a pleasant buzz, then a steady ache and the dim, proud feeling of having “played hard.”

When I hear his mother's footsteps, I pull back. My lips are throbbing. Mrs. Karl appears holding a tray topped with two glasses of lemonade, a fan of crackers, squares of bright orange cheese. She's managed to put on lipstick, a bright red that veers in and out of the lip line. I can't help feeling sorry for her.

“It's the best I could do on short notice,” she says, placing the tray on the coffee table. “It's those crackers you like so much, Karl. The buttery ones.”

He nods and scoops up a handful, dribbling them in his mouth like M & Ms.

“Take a lemonade, Eliza,” she instructs me.

I pick up a glass. It's a freebie one, from McDonalds. Under my thumb, the Hamburglar grins at me from behind his mask. “Thank you,” I smile.

Mrs. Karl remains standing, waiting for me to sip it, so I take a gulp to prove my sincerity. Then she looks to Karl, who is crunching contentedly on crackers. Satisfied, she can finally sit. She herself doesn't eat or drink anything, I notice. I suspect she is one of those housewives, like my mother, who cook and clean all day but are almost never seen to rest or eat.

Now it is totally quiet. The only sound is the intermittent crunching of Karl's teeth on the buttery crackers he likes so much. Mrs. Karl is watching him with a small red smile, like a squashed cherry.

Finally I say, “I like your house, Mrs. Irons.”

She shifts her gaze to me and presses her lips together. I can tell she's not sure if she can trust me or not, whether I am being honest or just kissing up. It's true, however. I do like her house; in a general sense, anyway. After six years of studio apartment living, any place with two floors and a basement feels like a mansion to me.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Karl says. Her mouth pinches tighter, two purse strings drawn shut. “So,” she says. “Eliza. Do you play music, too?” From the polite but pained look on her face, I can tell that she, like me, is recalling Karl's last girlfriend, who sang lead in an all-girl band and had her name legally changed to Lioness. “Or,” she adds hopefully, two fingers starting to fidget at the hem of her dress, “do you do…something else?”

I have two options here. I can tell Mrs. Karl about the job I don't get paid for: the book I am trying to write. Or, I can describe the job that actually produces a paycheck. Graciously, I go for the latter.

“I'm a copywriter,” I tell her. “For a travel agency. It's called Dreams Come True.” When she doesn't react, I add, “Inc.”

“Oh really?” Mrs. Karl says. Her face is relaxing. She sits forward and clasps her hands around her knees like a little girl. “What kinds of things do you copywrite?”

“A little bit of everything. Ads. Brochures. Radio spots. Press releases.” Karl, I notice, has stopped eating to listen, and I wonder if this is the first he's heard of specifically what I do in the hours we're not together. “Basically, I write about exotic places people can go on vacation. But I don't go on them. I just read about them. Then I advertise them. So other people can go.” Spelled out, it is the most depressing job in the world.

Mrs. Karl looks pleasantly confused. Karl's expression does not change. When neither of them makes a move to speak, I keep talking to fill the silence. I describe some of Dreams's vacation spots, then provide a couple of average hotel room rates and amenities. Feeling reckless, I toss out a few of my recent headlines:

Heavenly Hot Spots!

Sexy, Sizzlin' Summer Getaways!

Escaping The Woe-is-Me Winter Blahs!

At one point, I'm speaking entirely in adjectives.

Finally, in a moment that I'm sure feels metaphorical only to me, I inhale and conclude: “I write about fantasies. But here I am, stuck in reality.”

An ice cube pops, my cue to get offstage. I think a Hummel actually scowls. Mrs. Karl's smile fades into a look of concern. “Mmm hmm,” she murmurs, passing me the crackers like a consolation prize. Karl is nodding appreciatively.

Fixing my eyes on a daisy-shaped throw rug, I sit back and nibble on cheese. So far, I must admit, Mrs. Karl hasn't been that terrible. There have been no childhood stories, no trophies, no bronzed baby shoes. Any minute, though, I am positive she'll feel a bout of nostalgia coming on. First, she'll bring out the photo albums. Or she'll set up the slide projector and start narrating. Or she'll tell me the play-by-play details of the messy, painful, thirty-seven-hour labor that produced baby Karl.

When I finally dare to look up, it is even worse than I imagined. Mrs. Karl has defied all rock star–mother precedent by bypassing the childhood/nostalgia phase and going straight for the jugular: personal hygiene. I watch, horrified, as she plucks and pokes at Karl's rough stubble like it's a pesky weed that's invaded her garden. Before I know it, she's prodding at his gold hoop earrings, scouting his lobes for infection. She's picking up his hand and examining under his fingernails.

Karl's rock star image is fading by the second.

I know I need to act fast. Glancing around the room, I search for someplace secure to rest my eyes. Porcelain dogs. Porcelain saints. A pinecone bunny. A wreath made of shellacked Oreos. Panicked, I alight on the family portraits lined up on the windowsill. They are airbrushed, framed. I feel, momentarily, safe. But in a matter of seconds, I have identified the true origin of Karl's blue-eyed, red-haired rocker brawn: Ireland. Karl descends from a long line of pale, plump Irish people who beam at me from 8 x 11s, pink-cheeked great-uncles and great-great-uncles primped and propped and scrubbed clean by their wives, then filled to the brim with tea and sausages. When I turn back to Karl, I could swear his face has bleached a few shades.

“That sounds like a nice job,” Mrs. Karl is saying, hands refolded innocently around her knees. It's a few seconds before I realize she's still referring to me. “I'd love to travel someplace someday. The Bahamas. The Bermuda.” The Bermuda?
The Bermuda?
My head starts to pound, a small pickax between my eyes. “Someplace nice and sunny,” she says, sighing. She turns back to Karl. “You need to be careful in the sun, you know, honey. Next time I'm out, I'll pick you up some sunscreen.”

 

Back on the road in Karl's black Saab Turbo 9000 with the two amp-eight driver audio system, I am part frightened by what just happened and part dreading what must happen next. Karl is jamming to Korn, hot damp air is blasting through the sun-roof, and I am trying to control my headache by recalling Hannah's advice about talking gently to my cranium. Unfortunately, contrary to the spirit of the exercise, all that comes to mind is
Screw you, cranium!
The only spot of comfort in this fiasco is the anticipation of gloating when I recap the afternoon for Andrew.

If my best friend Hannah tends to be abstract, my best friend Andrew defines concrete. The man is made of calculators and train schedules, Bic pens and neckties, packs of minty fresh gum. He is a law student at Penn, lives in Chestnut Hill, and reads books with words like “Earn,” “Win” and “10 Tips” in the titles. I tell him he's going to end up one of those guys who paces on train platforms, barking into his cell phone, crunching on antacids, heart about to leap screaming from his chest.

“That will never be me,” Andrew says with mock sincerity. Ever since his dad's bypass surgery, I joke about this because it terrifies me. “I will never have a cell phone.”

My two best friends have little in common besides their friendships with me. They try hard at conversation, but everything they say just misses the other. Hannah's words waft past Andrew's ears. Andrew's zing over Hannah's head. I watch their conversations like cartoons, complete with
whap
s and
blam
s and
whoosh
s.

Andrew: So, how's the psych school treating you?

Hannah: Oh, pretty well, I guess. I'm learning a lot. That's the important thing.

Andrew: I thought making money was the important thing.

Hannah (thoughtful): I know what you mean. It's easy to forget why we do what we do…to lose our centers. We need to be careful not to neglect our spiritual side.

Andrew (confused): But I love neglecting my spiritual side.

Eventually, my two best friends wind up silent and perplexed in each other's presence. Hannah takes Andrew far too seriously. Andrew can't conceive of someone so lacking in irony. I figure I'm somewhere in between. Part of me views life with Andrew's casual distance, roughhousing with it, boxing it into bad puns, slinging an arm around its shoulders and buying it a martini. Another part of me knows that nothing, absolutely nothing, rolls right off me.

Technically speaking, I have a repartee with Andrew that I'll never have with Hannah; some of this stems from the fact that Hannah doesn't watch TV. Andrew and my conversations are sharp, subtle, almost scriptlike, relying on a shared history of college and pop culture that requires little explication. With Hannah, conversation is more patient. It requires more pauses and thoughts and words. Sometimes I wish I could toss out a reference like “pork chops and applesauce,” knowing she'd be right there with me. (She wouldn't. I tried it once and she gave me a brochure about the dangers of fatty acids.) Despite all their differences, however, both my best friends think the rock star/mother curse is in my head.

“No one's mother is that bad,” Andrew insists.

“They are.”

“They're not.”

“Why would I make this stuff up?”

“You're not making it up. You're just exaggerating. Like always.”

By “always,” Andrew is referring to life since he met me: freshman year of college. Both Andrew and I went to Wissahickon, a small, expensive school made of brick and pine trees in the hills of central Pennsylvania. Technically, we met while passing a Nerf ball between our chins during an awkward freshman icebreaker. But our first real conversation was on a Saturday, one month later, when the rest of our dorm was still out partying and both of us had retreated, half drunk, to the basement “lounge” to watch late-night reruns of
The Brady Bunch.

“You know,” Andrew said. We were sitting side by side on the single puke-green couch that hadn't yet been stolen. “Jan doesn't get the credit she deserves. She's a cute girl.”

“Maybe.” It was the Grand Canyon episode, part one of the three-parter when Bobby and Cindy get lost in the hills, the gang gets thrown in jail, and Alice rides backward on a mule. “But Greg's the real babe of the show,” I said, slurring so “babe of the show” sounded alarmingly, but sort of interestingly, like “Barbarino.” “Remember the one where he called himself Johnny Bravo?”