Monday I Love You (6 page)

“Grace, it's Mary Govoni. Could you baby-sit Saturday? I have a lecture I don't want to miss, and my regular sitter just called to say she has the chicken pox. So I thought of you.”

Why did you think of me? I wondered. Probably because you know I'm available, am always available. No wild parties for Grace. No bizarre teen behavior with the boys. Grace, the perfect, most reliable sitter. She even does the dishes.

I hate myself when I get like that. I hate me when I'm bitter. Even if I have good reason to be bitter.

I wondered if Ashley ever baby-sat.

I told her okay. It was the least I could do. For all I know, Govoni might be on my side.

I didn't even know she
had
kids.

9

William was my first real friend. He had a wide, flat forehead and a snub nose that was so small I wondered how he could breathe through it. When I asked him what he did when he had a cold, he only laughed and punched me. William had beautiful dark eyes. When my mother saw William, she said, “With those eyes, he'll be a heartbreaker someday.” I didn't know what a heart-breaker was and imagined William hammering away at a box of heart-shaped candies, the cinnamon kind, which were my favorites.

That was the summer I was six. William was eight and big for his age. My father was a croupier at a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. It was a very responsible job, he said. He worked all night, and sometimes, if I woke early, I went outside and waited for him at the curb. He always took a cab home. He wore a black suit and a very white shirt and black patent-leather shoes just like mine. It was his job to keep an eye on the money at the gaming tables where people bet. Once he saw a man lose ten thousand dollars on one roll of the dice, he told me. Being a croupier was a very demanding job, he said. My mother and father and I rented a little gray cottage a few blocks from the beach. We heard the waves roll in and out and watched the lights from the Ferris wheel and listened to the gulls complain about the handouts they got. Gulls are very greedy and not really nice, though sometimes beautiful. Like some people I know.

Sand drifted into our clothes, our teeth, our hair. Under our front door. The smell of the sea fought with the smell of saltwater taffy. Sometimes when the wind rose and the tide with it, we'd walk down to the ocean to watch the waves.

William and I ran back and forth, getting as close to the water as we could without getting wet. William was a daredevil, much more so than me, and once he got caught and was dragged out, out farther than I could reach. I saw his arms sticking up, heard him call. I put my hands over my eyes and looked through my fingers at his head riding the waves. I was terrified. I tried to yell but my voice wouldn't work. An old man walking his dog waded in and took William by the hair and pulled him to the sand. Up ahead, our mothers, William's and mine, walked placidly on the boardwalk. They didn't turn their heads. They hadn't seen what had happened.

“You kids get back to where you come from,” said the old man in an angry voice. His face looked yellow, and his narrow shoulders had big moles all over. He was breathing hard. His dog barked until he said, “Quiet, boy.”

“Tell your mother to keep an eye on you or you might not be so lucky next time,” the old man told us, and we ran away and didn't even thank him.

When William's mother scolded him for getting all wet, we looked at each other and didn't tell. It was our secret.

William and I vowed eternal friendship. We might've even if William hadn't been swept out to sea. We thought if we were eternal friends, we would help each other through life. We'd be blood brothers. That's what William said. First, though, he told me we'd have to cut ourselves and mix our blood together, and that would make us blood brothers and eternal friends.

“That's what some American Indians used to do,” William said. I said I was scared of blood. He said it wouldn't bleed much. He got a shell from the beach and broke it into two sharp pieces with a rock. William said he'd do the cutting. I was scared of being hurt. He said it wouldn't hurt much.

“Put up your hand,” he told me, so I did. The shell slashed across my skin like fire, and blood came out all over. He threw the piece of shell away.

“Suck it, suck it!” William yelled. I sucked as hard as I could. Then William cut himself with his piece of shell, only it was a little cut, not big like mine.

It hurt, even though William said it wouldn't. It
did
hurt.

We held our hands over another, bigger shell that was shaped like a little dish and let our blood drip into it. William stirred our blood for a while, mixing it.

“Now we're blood brothers,” William said.

Only mine wouldn't stop coming. We went inside to ask William's mother's boyfriend Alfie if he could stop my blood coming.

Alfie jumped out of his chair and hollered, “What goes on here? You crazy kid!” and I knew he meant William. Alfie bandaged my hand as best he could, and pretty soon it started leaking through the bandage, so Alfie put us in the car and took us to the emergency room at the hospital. They fixed us up there, both William and me, and the doctor wanted to know how we'd got the cuts. William said he was playing with a knife and it slipped and got me. And him too, though his cut was only little. William was a good liar. He always made up stories like that.

My cut turned out to be in the shape of a V. A big V. William's looked like a straight line. He was a little disappointed but not much.

“Now we're blood brothers,” he told me. I had always wanted a brother and so didn't mind that it hurt, getting a brother. My mother and father said I better not play anymore with William. I said it wasn't his fault.

William's mother told fortunes in a gypsy tearoom. She was a Russian princess who escaped from Russia in a sleigh pulled by snow-white horses. William's father was a prince who was eaten by wolves. All this happened before William was born. When William's eyes got all wide and glistening, I knew he was making it up.

After the cutting, my mother didn't like William anymore. “He's too pretty for a boy … and too wild, cutting you like that. It's a disgrace.”

William too pretty? How could that be? He was William. Everything he did astonished and delighted me. I had never had such a friend.

“What a beautiful child,” I heard people say as William and I raced by, barefooted, hand in hand, in hot pursuit of sunshine and sea and saltwater taffy. “What a perfectly beautiful child.”

At first, I stopped and smiled at them, thinking they spoke about both of us. William and me. Then I became aware that their faces turned toward William, away from me. They smiled at him, patted his rosy cheeks.

“He's my brother,” I told them proudly. William swung my hand and grinned at me, nodding. “She's my sister,” he said, pleased at our playacting. Then we spun in wide circles, and the sand hid between our toes and we were completely, utterly happy.

I won a straw hat at a penny pitching booth on the boardwalk that summer. It had a blue band and was too big for me. I had to keep my hand on it whenever I went walking. The wind from the ocean wanted that hat in the worst way. Every night I watched my father put on his black bow tie and suit. Then he'd brush his hair and put such a straight part in it it looked as if it was made with an ax. My father wore after-shave lotion that my mother said made him smell like a fruit. She didn't say what fruit. I sniffed at him and decided he smelled like a cherry, but William said he smelled more like an apple.

It was my best summer. I wished my father could've gone on being a croupier, but he was let go because business at the casino was down. That's what he said, anyway. William and I saw an old man skateboarding down the boardwalk. I thought it might be the same old man who'd rescued William, but William said it wasn't. The man who rescued him, William said, had yellow hair and wore two big gold rings on each hand. I think he was wrong. We waited to see if the man on the skateboard would stop so we could see if he had gold rings on as well as yellow hair, but he just kept moving fast, until one day he tripped over a runaway cat and went flying and broke all his bones and never went skateboarding again. We heard all sorts of stories.

My cut finally healed. I had a big V right where my thumb went out. William didn't have anything. His cut was all gone. He was very sad about that. He said he'd send me a postcard. William and his mother and Alfie were going to try their luck in Florida. My mother wrote our address down on a piece of paper, which I gave to William. But I never heard from him.

It was that summer of my friendship with William that made me half conscious of the fact that I was not an appealing child. I knew that from the way they looked at William, their faces all open and joyful, and the way they looked at me.

I tried. God knows I tried. But even with ribbons plaited in my newly washed hair, a smile on my face and red sandals my mother bought me on my feet, I lacked the special quality that makes a child appealing. Over the years, I told myself, things might change, I might develop this quality; but now I know this is not so. Nor will it ever be.

I am the sort who's always chosen last, the wallflower, though I do not dance. In this life there are winners and losers. I'm a loser. If I could do anything to change this, I would. But I am powerless. There is nothing to do but accept it and get on with my life.

10

In the morning my head felt as if it was filled with rocks. My eyes seemed stuck together with Scotch tape, my face as sticky as if I'd eaten a Hershey bar while I was sleeping. I considered playing dead. You read about people having little strokes, little heart attacks no one even knows they've had until their personality changes drastically. Or they start mumbling and can't even remember their own name. Or what day of the week it is, or even the year. Or they forget words for simple things, like “fork” or “soap.”

I'd read about a disease that makes people age prematurely. There were pictures showing ten-year-olds who looked like senior citizens. Or twelve-year-olds who looked in their eighties. It was terrible, tragic. I decided maybe that's what ailed me. There was nothing young or charming or spirited about me. I might as well be a hundred as fifteen. I walked old, talked old, thought old.

I ran my hands over my face, searching for wrinkles; big dark moles sprung up in the night when my eyes were closed. Sunken cheeks on account of my teeth were all gone. The only part of me that might pass for young was my mouth. I had a really nice mouth. Even I had to admit that. It was well shaped and sort of curly at the ends. And naturally red. When I smiled, my mother kept telling me, I had a glow. Estelle said she thought my ears were nicer than my mouth. Estelle and I sometimes dissected each other, good points against bad. I told Estelle she had nice hair. Privately I thought if Estelle's mother didn't lay off with the elaborate hairdos, Estelle was headed for trouble.

There weren't enough good points between me and Estelle combined, though, to make one halfway decent-looking person. That was the truth of it.

“Grace.” My mother breathed through the keyhole. “Time to get up.”

I made a noise so she'd know I'd heard. Suppose I said I wasn't going to get up? Suppose I said I was afraid to leave the house? That from here on in I was housebound. Agoraphobia, they call it. Fear of open spaces. A terrible thing and very real. Lots of people, I'd read, suffered from it. There didn't seem to be any cure. If you had agoraphobia, you sat in your house all day huddled in a shawl, peering from behind the curtains at the postman, the United Parcel truck, the paperboy who always threw the paper under the hedge or into the neighbor's yard. You got somebody to go to the grocery store to get your groceries. You got a friend to take your books back to the library and get out some more books. They were never books you cared about reading, but you were in no position to be choosy. You were anchored to your house forever more.

I tried to imagine what it would be like. I would never have to go to school again, never have to see Ashley or Charlie Oates. They'd send home my lessons and my exams, and I'd never have to go to the girls' room again. Never be shoved and whispered at by a ferret-faced little creep in a black leather jacket who never had a girl so much as say hi to him. No more fat mama stuff for me.

Estelle would come to report the school news to me when she brought my homework over. Dr. Gleason would have to come to the house to fill my teeth. My mother would trudge over to Ware's and buy me a pair of jeans from the women's department where they specialized in large sizes. And she'd splurge and buy me two pairs of pink panties with elastic around the waist and legs, panties that when I took them off you could still see where they'd been on account of the elastic tracks printed on my flesh.

I lay very still, watching my chest move up and down, wondering if it was possible to turn my life around. The way they keep telling you. Make Your Life Happen. Gain Control of Your Life. This Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life. Blah, blah, blah.

“Grace. Dear. It's getting late.”

If I sealed off my keyhole, how would my mother and I communicate? Maybe we'd write each other notes, which we'd leave on the kitchen table. And when my father came home from time to time, he'd read them silently, stooping a little over the table, looking over his shoulder now and then as if he was doing something secret and forbidden.

If I never left the house, I decided, I'd be as good as dead. Which wouldn't be a tremendous change from what I was right now. Still, there were certain things—flowers, the look of the sky when it was filled with clumps of little clouds bundled together in one corner, like sheep in a pasture. Children, the way they move, the way their mittens dangle at the end of strings stuffed up their sleeves. I wouldn't want never to go outside. It would be very boring, for one thing.