Melissa Senate (4 page)

One day, when I was sixteen, I found Mark crying in the garage behind the drums. He stopped the second he saw me approaching. He told me his girlfriend had dumped him but he didn’t care because he liked
me,
then put my hand on his zipper. He’d used every lie and line there was, like
it hurts so bad
(his heart and his case of “blue balls,” which I fell for) and
I really think we’re meant for each other.
And after asking him if he would attend the BLA junior prom with me and getting an “I would love to be your date,” I gave Mark Feeler my virginity, on the dirty shag rug behind the drum set. Stella had lost her virginity to Silas when she was fourteen, but I still didn’t tell her. I wanted to be the only one who knew, the only one who felt the way I did, the only one who had that kind of physical and emotional connection to someone.

By dinnertime, when I’d been writing
Ruby Feeler
in hearts on my notebooks and twirling around my room, Mark was getting back together with his girlfriend. And by the end of the week, when I asked him for the tenth time if he’d still attend the prom with me (he’d brushed me off all week), he told me to stop bothering him already, that he was sorry he “literally and theoretically screwed” me and if he’d known I’d moon around after him every minute for the rest of his life, he never would have touched me. He wasn’t going to my stupid prom and he had a girlfriend, so he’d appreciate if I “left him the fuck alone.”

Stella had heard most of that. She’d been standing outside the garage, sent by my mother to find me and get to the bottom of why I’d been such a mopey mess all week. I hadn’t even realized Stella was in the garage until a guitar hit the wall an inch from Mark’s head, which had been her aim. She grabbed another guitar, and he grabbed the fire extinguisher and started spraying at us. We ran out, then he hit the button that electronically lowered the door.

I’d fallen to my knees on the driveway, white crud all over me, sobbing, and Stella lifted me up under my arms and practically dragged me into our house, upstairs to our room and put me in the bathtub, fully clothed, where I cried uncontrollably for a half hour. Stella sat there on the floor, her back against the tub, telling me over and over how sorry she was, that Mark Feeler was a loser jerk and would get his some day, that karma always took care of scum buckets.

By the time our mom had come in and asked why I was taking a bath with my clothes on and what was that white stuff all over Stella, Stella and I looked at each other and actually smiled.

Mark Feeler left for college that fall, and his parents sold the house the following summer, so I didn’t have to see him much and then I never saw him again.

There won’t be a moment’s hesitation. You won’t have to think about it. Won’t be grossed out by the thought of it. Everything will feel right. That’s how you don’t end up regretting something, even if it ends up not working out.

I supposed Stella was right about that. I didn’t regret losing my virginity to Mark Feeler, despite what happened. Before I knew what a jerk he was, I’d been madly in love.

I sipped my Coke and stole one of her malt balls. “There’s a big difference between being sixteen and being twenty-nine.”

“Being in love feels different depending on your age?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“Stella, what I cared about at sixteen and what I care about now are very different.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the
feeling.
Not the reasons.”

“Stell, if two men wanted to marry you tomorrow, who would you pick—a guy who you couldn’t stop fantasizing about, or a guy who would make a great father and a dependable, loving husband, a life partner?”

“Neither,” she said. “I’d hold out for the combo.”

“I mean, in your current state. Pregnant. As in you have more than just yourself to think about.”

“I’d still hold out for the combo,” she said. “Why do I choose between either? And do you?”

“I’m not settling for Tom. Tom’s everything I ever wanted in a husband. He’s what I used to dream about, Stella.” And that was true. I used to dream about someone who wouldn’t leave, who loved me that much.

“You used to dream about your white knight getting off his horse in Dockers and a crooked tie?” She raised an eyebrow. “Right.”

“I’m talking about security. Feeling safe. Knowing heart and soul that it’s forever. Unlike our father. Unlike stupid Mark Feeler. Unlike any guy I dated before Tom.”

“So, you’re saying if any of those guys had proposed, you would have said yes?”

I hated when we spoke different languages. I wasn’t sure if she was being bitchy or if she really didn’t understand. “Stella, I didn’t say yes to Tom because he asked. I said yes because I want to spend the rest of my life with him. And not just because he makes me feel safe. I can talk to Tom about anything, open up about how I’m feeling—
and
still feel safe.”

She laughed. “Like you have anything to tell him? You don’t even jaywalk, Ruby. Please.”

I rolled my eyes at her. What was the point of trying to talk Tom with Stella? Nick’s face floated into my mind and I blinked him away, focusing instead on the license plate of the car in front of ours. I glanced at Stella and was surprised to see her gnawing at her lower lip. Something she only did when she actually was deep in thought. “Do you think you’ll ever love someone the way you loved Silas?” I asked. I tried to picture him as he might be now, twelve years later at twenty-nine, but only the seventeen-year-old boy he’d been, with his slightly too long hair and those gorgeous blue eyes and his ever-present
Question Authority
Tshirts, which he made and sold for ten bucks each, came to mind.

She shot me a dirty look. “You can’t use him as an example. No one will ever compare or have a chance to compare. He died, Ruby.”

There were the rocky cliffs and the Atlantic Ocean and a sign that said
Swim At Your Own Risk,
and Silas was a risk taker. Stella hadn’t been with him that day. We’d graduated from high school a few weeks before, and Stella and I and our mother had gone to the outlets in Freeport to shop for Stella’s big trip; she and Silas were going to backpack through Europe for the
year.
In that relationship, Stella was the checkpoint, which made both me and my mother nervous—Stella? The more cautious? The more responsible? But they were
StellaandSilas,
and Stella had insisted that she would go to culinary school when they returned from their year of seeing the world and become a major chef in New York City, where Silas would study filmmaking at NYU.

She didn’t cry, as she often did whenever Silas’s name came up. She just put her hand to her belly and closed her eyes for a moment, then sipped at her milk shake.

I stared out the window at the passing trees and cars, already wishing I was back home, a stack of novels beside me on the porch swing. Tom beside me on the porch swing. The first weeks after school ended were always my favorite of the entire summer; it meant two delicious months were ahead of me, a lazy Maine summer of swimming in the ocean and taking a continuing education class in something interesting like Ancient Greek Civilization or Knitting For Beginners. But now two or three weeks of who-knew-what stretched out in front of me.

Stella wanted to stop at the outlets in Kittery, at the border of Maine and New Hampshire. “I only packed yoga pants, a bunch of tank tops, my flip-flops, and my Sevens. I need a few cute light cardigans and a dress and shoes. You don’t think I’ll pop in the next few weeks, do you?”

“A pregnant teacher at BLA didn’t start showing until she was almost five months along,” I told her.

“Good, because I’m not ready to shop in Maternity World,” she said as we headed for a kiosk with maps of store listings and locations. “It’s weird—I want to stay skinny
and
have a big pregnant belly already. I want evidence that the baby is in there. Do you remember Mom’s story about the first time she felt us kick?”

She’d been alone in the apartment in Queens. Our father hadn’t come home that night (she’d told us this when we were adults) and she was feeling so alone. And then she felt two swift kicks. Simultaneously. She said she never felt alone after that.

I smiled at my sister and gave her a hug. “No matter what, Stella, you always have me. You know that, right?”

“Duh,” she said, opening the door to J. Jill.

Our mother had loved these outlets. She liked the road trip down to Kittery, the shopping, the lunch, the more shopping, and the girl talk on the way back. Once Stella had moved to New York City, my mom and I hadn’t gone as often, but we headed down twice a year for new winter and summer clothes. I hadn’t been back since her death. Hadn’t bought any new winter clothes that season, let alone summer clothes. I tended toward classics with the occasional trendy piece thrown in, so my old wardrobe held up okay.

I ended up buying a sundress and let Stella talk me into buying red espadrilles that tied slightly up the ankles. Stella got two dresses, a slinky red sleeveless wrap dress that would likely accommodate her for the next few months, and a sundress like mine. We also bought two fun straw hats that tied under the chin so our hair wouldn’t blow around in the convertible.

Back in the car, in the parking lot, Stella whipped off her white tank top, embroidered with Are You Talkin’ To Me? across her chest, and put on one of the new tanks she’d bought, pale pink with Hot Mama written across the front in rhinestones. She certainly was accepting of her situation. And didn’t have a modest bone in her body. Granted, we always put the top up when we stopped, but still, there were
windows.

I ripped off the tag for her. “Stella, there is something I need to know. Are you sure that Jake or James or Jason, or whatever his name is, is the father? Not the artist?”

Last I heard, in her “professional muse” capacity, Stella was working as a nude model for an artist with a wealthy wife. According to Stella, he paid well. Six months living expenses in advance, and Stella lived in New York City. I didn’t pry and press into Stella’s life the way she did into mine, but since the artist was in his fifties and married with children, I had asked her if there was sex involved, and she’d said yes in an angry tone, then changed the subject. In other words:
Don’t judge me, you sanctimonious bitch.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I haven’t seen Jeffrey in three months.”

“You quit?” I asked, wondering how she was supporting herself. Fifty-dollar face readings couldn’t add up to rent in New York City.

We’d each received half of what our mother’s house had gone for. It had sold immediately, for which I’d been grateful. I’d needed new people in it so that even if the outside was the same white antique cape with the black shutters and red door, the inside was different, the walls painted other colors, the furnishings someone else’s. It would then cease to be our mother’s house; her spirit was in her choices, her furnishings, her decor, her color schemes.

Still, Stella had received that money two years ago and had done a lot of traveling the year following our mom’s death. She’d even gone to India, to an ashram. Though I supposed there wasn’t much call for money on an ashram. She’d also gone to several European countries that year to follow U2’s concert tour, then settled in Dublin for six months to be “spiritually closer to Bono.”

And the “sizable earnings” earmarked for her college education had been spent in the years immediately following high-school graduation. After Silas died, Stella had stayed home, in bed, for a month. My mother and I had sat at her side when she’d let us, brought her food when she’d eat it, and just let her cry and cried with her. I was supposed to be a counselor at a sleepaway camp in the Berkshires that summer with my friend Amy, but I’d canceled. In early August, Stella said she was moving to New York to go to culinary school, just as she and Silas had planned.

And she did enroll at the Peter Kumps cooking school, but she dropped out after a month and used her money to bankroll her fleeting interests. For a year it was a novel that didn’t progress past page fifty-four. Head shots every few months for acting jobs that never panned out, except for an occasional “real person” commercial and a stint doing corporate videos about supervisor-employee relations. And then it was airline tickets and hotel suites. Our mother always said that Stella would find her way when it was her time.

“I didn’t quit,” Stella said as a sign welcomed us to New Hampshire. “I was sort of fired. His wife walked in on us.”

I glanced at her. “What happened?”

“She came charging in with a bucket full of cold water and dumped it all over me, screaming ‘I knew it!’ and that I was a ‘piece of shit whore’ over and over again. And then she told me to get out of her house, using every expletive imaginable. She threw something at me, too, a little statue, I think. It hit me in the back and left a huge bruise.” She shot me a glare. “Don’t look at me like that, Ruby. I hate that.”

“I’m not judging you, Stell,” I said. But I was.

She sent me the usual eye roll. “Anyway, that was the end of that. I missed him for a long time after.”

“You were in love?” I asked. I’d figured it was about the money.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I felt something. But I liked the crazy part of it, too. I liked that he paid my way, that I was his muse. There are two paintings of me in a very important gallery right now.”

“Didn’t it bother you, though? That he was married? A father? I’m just trying to imagine why you—why anyone—would be interested in someone who was cheating on his family. I mean, to me, it just makes that person immediately unworthy. A slime bucket. I judge
him.
”

She was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said, settling her huge white pearly sunglasses in front of her eyes. “I don’t want to talk about it. Let’s put our hats on,” she added, pulling over onto the shoulder and reaching into the shopping bag.