I Suck at Girls (2 page)

“Fair enough,” I replied.

“First and foremost, I’m a scientist,” he said, clearing his throat.

“I agree.”

“I don’t give a shit if you agree. It’s not up for debate. I’m
telling
you: First and foremost, I’m a scientist. And as a scientist, I can’t help but think about things critically. Sometimes it can be a curse. What I wouldn’t give every once in a while to be a blithering idiot skipping through life with shit in my pants like it’s a goddamned party.”

I sprinkled red chili flakes on my barbecue chicken pizza and sat back to listen.

“So, scientifically speaking, marriage breaks down like this: There are six billion people on the planet. Say half are women. Now, taking into account age ranges and all that, even if you were picky—”

“I’m picky,” I interrupted.

“I’m speaking universally, not about you specifically. The world doesn’t constantly revolve around you. Just eat your fucking pizza and listen.”

He waited silently until I grabbed a slice of pizza and shoved it in my mouth.

“Okay, so even if you were picky, you could probably be happily married to any one of a hundred and fifty million different women,” he said.

This was surprising. My parents had been married thirty-two years, and my dad worshipped my mother. He was never shy about telling us that she came first. Once, when I was six, my dad put down a science journal he was reading over breakfast. It had a giant asteroid on the cover. He looked at me and my brothers and said, “If an asteroid hit the earth and it was a nuclear holocaust and the air was breathable, which it wouldn’t be, I could be okay with your mother and I being the last two people alive.”

“What about us?” my brother Evan asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t just move on. There’d be a grieving period, obviously. I’m not an asshole,” my dad replied before letting out a big belly laugh.

My dad loves my mother as if he has a biological need to be with her. So hearing him tell me casually that any one of us could be happily married to one hundred and fifty million different people seemed inconsistent with his own example.

“You don’t buy that. I know you don’t think you could have what you have with Mom with someone else,” I said.

“I said I had two things to tell you. Now,
scientifically
, that’s how it breaks down. But we’re complex animals, and we’re constantly changing. Things I thought ten years ago seem like absolute bullshit now. So there’s no scientific formula to predict how things are going to work out with a marriage, because a marriage in year one is completely different from the same marriage ten years later. So when you’re dealing with something incredibly unpredictable, like human beings, numbers and formulas don’t mean shit. The best you can do is take all the information you have and, scientifically speaking, do what?” he asked, staring at me, awaiting an answer.

“Uh … I don’t know,” I said, unsure if this was a rhetorical question.

“I should buy you a fucking sign that says ‘I don’t know’ to save you time. The best you can do is make an educated guess, son.

“So I’ll tell you what I did right before I asked your mother to marry me: I took a day and I sat and I thought about all the things I had learned about myself, and about women, up to that point in my life. Just sat and thought. I may have smoked marijuana as well. Anyway, at the end of the day, I took stock of everything I’d gone through in my head, and I asked myself if I still wanted to propose to your mother. And I did. So that’s what I humbly suggest you do, unless you think you’re somehow smarter than I am, which, considering you share my genetics, is unlikely,” he said, laughing as he sat back and took a big sip of Diet Coke.

I paid the tab and I dropped off my dad back at home.

The next day was the day I’d planned to propose to Amanda.

I had booked a flight to San Francisco, and arranged for her best friend to bring her to a restaurant for brunch, where I’d be waiting to surprise her and pop the question. From the time I dropped my dad off, I had exactly twenty-four hours until I was due to meet Amanda.

I got in my Honda Accord and drove to Balboa Park in downtown San Diego. When I got to the parking lot, I got out of my car and started walking in no particular direction. There, in the shadows of the large Spanish buildings that housed most of San Diego’s museums, I spent the entire day doing just as my dad suggested: thinking as far back as I could remember and replaying every moment that had ever taught me anything about women and myself, from the awkwardness of childhood to the tribulations of adolescence and early manhood, in hopes that, before the day was done, I would know that the decision I was about to make was, at the very least, an educated guess.

I Like It

In elementary school, the first day of school is a big one for many reasons—mostly because it’s when students find out where they’ll be sitting for seven hours a day for the next nine months. One poor choice can doom a youngster’s social life for the year. Three weeks before I entered second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Vanguard, a slender woman in her fifties with a haircut that made her look like George Washington, sent her students’ parents a letter announcing that seats would be determined on a first-come, first-served basis. If ever there would be a Black-Friday-at-Walmart stampede of marauding seven-year-olds, this was surely it.

“I want to be there at six in the morning,” I announced to my parents in our kitchen the evening before school started.

“Six
A.M
.? You running a fuckin’ dairy farm? No. Not happening,” my dad said.

I remembered what my friend Jeremy had told me that afternoong—that he was planning to be first in line outside the school doors at sunrise, to make sure he got the best possible seat—and started to work myself into a panic.

My mom looked at me sympathetically. “We’ll get you there as early as we can, but not if you don’t put some pants on before you come to dinner.” My evening wear that night was a pair of Transformers tighty-whiteys and a T-shirt featuring Walter Mondale’s silk-screened face over the slogan
MONDALE’S GOT THE BEEF
.

The next morning, when my dad woke me up the way he did every weekday morning—by ripping the covers off me and hurling them to the floor while loudly humming “The Ride of the Valkryies”—I burst out of my bed and looked at the clock. 7:30
A.M
.! School started at 8:00!

“Dad, you said you’d wake me up really early!” I yelled in outrage.

“Bullshit. I distinctly remember saying I would do the exact opposite of that.”

I got ready as fast as I could, but by the time my mom dropped me off at school and I sprinted to my classroom, clutching my backpack to my chest to maximize my speed, I was horrified to discover that there were only three empty seats left. I stood behind the thirty or so desks that faced the long green chalkboard at the front of the class and carefully considered my next move. The first empty seat was in the front row, directly facing Mrs. Vanguard’s desk. That would be social suicide. No one wanted to come near her desk. It’d be like buying a house underneath a freeway overpass in Detroit. The second was next to a chubby kid who’d had two accidents in his pants the year before, both of which required the chair he was sitting in to be hosed off and disposed of in the Dumpster by a janitor wearing surgical gloves and a mask.

The third seat was next to a red-haired girl I’d never seen before. She had a smattering of freckles across her face and a button nose that made her look like she’d been created by a Disney animator. I didn’t like girls—not because I thought they were gross or had cooties, but for the same reason I didn’t like underwear: they seemed unnecessary and mildly annoying. But this seat appeared to be the least of the three evils, so I headed in that direction and slung my backpack over the chair. My red-haired classmate turned and smiled at me, and for some reason, I was taken aback. I tried to greet her, but my brain couldn’t decide whether to say “hi” or “hello.”

“Halo,” I spluttered.

“Hi. I’m Kerry Thomason,” she replied brightly.

That was all she said to me that day, but it was enough to make my stomach feel a little queasy. I didn’t know why, but I wanted Kerry to pay attention to me. And, as the weeks went on, it seemed like antagonizing her was the best and most fun way to get her to do so. I spent that first week poking her sides with my pencil eraser, stealing her My Little Pony–themed Trapper Keeper, and generally doing anything I could to get her to notice me, except for actually speaking to her. The only words she said to me that week were “please stop,” and that only made me want to keep doing whatever I was doing.

About two weeks into the school year, I finally pushed my luck too far. I brought into school a drawing I had spent half the night and a full carton of crayons creating and plopped it down on Kerry’s desk before the first bell rang. She took one look at it and burst into tears. At the first sound of crying, Mrs. Vanguard popped her head up from her prepackaged weight-loss meal and rushed over to Kerry. She was asking Kerry what was wrong when she saw the drawing—and gasped in horror.

She turned to me and asked, “Did you do this?”

“Yes?” I responded hesitantly as I began to realize that my plot to impress Kerry might not come off as planned.

“That is disgusting,” Mrs. Vanguard said. She grabbed my arm above the elbow, her fingers cutting off my circulation, and walked me straight down the hall to the principal’s office.

I had never seen the inside of the principal’s office before, but I’d always imagined it would be like a king’s chamber in a palace, complete with fresh bowls of fruit, a throne, and a small disfigured man who did all the principal’s bidding. Instead, the waiting room was disappointing: a drab ten-by-ten room featuring a framed poster of a bodybuilder struggling to deadlift a huge weight bar, captioned with the slogan
BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
. Mrs. Vanguard dumped me in a metal folding chair next to a desk, behind which sat the principal’s secretary, a short, squat woman in her sixties with a huge nose and ears like a fifty-year-old prizefighter. She looked at me and shook her head, and it was at that moment that I realized I was in pretty big trouble. I managed to keep my composure until Mrs. Vanguard said, “We’re going to call your parents, Justin.”

“No! Please, no,” I said, starting to cry and shaking my head in fear like someone pleading with a killer for his life. She stepped out of the office, and when the door shut behind her it was so quiet that I could hear my heart pounding in unison with the ticking of the wall clock. The secretary consulted her ledger, picked up the phone, punched a few numbers, and said, “Can I speak to Mr. Halpern, please? It’s about his son.”

The hours that followed were some of the longest of my life. Every time I heard approaching footsteps, I was sure they belonged to my parents, and my muscles tensed in fear. As frightened as I was, though, I also found myself thinking about Kerry. I didn’t want her to see I’d been crying, so I dried my tears with the backs of my hands and used my shirt cuffs to wipe the snot that was running down my nose. I thought about how she smiled at me on the first day of class. I thought about how I liked the way she dotted her I’s with hearts, and the way she sneered at me every time she came back from the bathroom and I asked her if she had taken a poo. I thought about Kerry so intently during those two hours that I almost forgot how terrified I was that my parents were coming.

And then the door opened, and my dad entered. I had prayed my mom would arrive first, but she was never as punctual as my dad. He was carrying his brown leather briefcase, and his eyebrows were like two tiny arrows pointing almost straight down toward his nose. He was not happy.

“Okay, I’m here. What in hell is going on?” he asked, looking at me and then the principal’s secretary.

I sat quietly, staring at the ground, avoiding eye contact with my father.

“Hi, Mr. Halpern. Thank you for coming,” the secretary said.

“Yeah, no problem. Just a thirty-five-mile drive in the middle of my workday. Goddamn pleasure.”

The secretary shot me a look, a silent cry for help. I glanced back at the floor; she was on her own.

“Uh … well … Justin acted incredibly inappropriately in class, and his teacher had no choice but to remove him,” she said.

“Ah, hell. What’d he do? He pull out his pecker and show it to somebody?” my dad asked.

“Uh, no,” the secretary said, between deep breaths. “His teacher will be with you shortly. She can explain,” she added quickly.

My dad plopped himself down in a chair directly across from mine, so that he could focus his intense stare on me without any obstruction, and silently mouthed the words “You’re in deep shit, chief.” I don’t think I saw him blink or look away once. A few minutes later, when my mom entered the small office, the secretary stood up from behind her desk, reopened the door, and walked us back down the hallway to my classroom. With every step my throat tightened. It was recess, so my classmates were playing outside; at least Kerry wouldn’t be privy to my humiliation. When we got to the classroom Mrs. Vanguard was sitting behind her big wooden desk, and she motioned for us to sit down in front of her. As my mom and I quietly took our seats, my dad wrestled to squeeze himself into one of the tiny chairs. Finally he just said “Screw it” and sat on top of the desk.

“Mr. and Mrs. Halpern, this morning Justin gave this drawing he made to a girl he sits next to in class,” my teacher said, sliding a piece of lined paper across the table to my mom and dad.

My parents both leaned in to examine it. My mom took one look and let out a sigh in disappointment. My dad leaned in for a closer look.

“Jesus, what the hell kind of drawing is this?” he said.

It was a crude drawing of a smiling, female stick figure with red hair and a T-shirt that read “Kerry.” Above Kerry’s head was a yellow dog. Those two elements alone, of course, would not have caused a problem. Unfortunately, there was a third element to the drawing: a shower of large brown clumps raining down from the yellow dog’s rear onto Kerry’s face. And just in case the viewer wasn’t sure how Kerry felt about that, a thought bubble protruding from her head read, “I like it.”