Roomies (5 page)

I write a short e-mail to Keyon thanking him for the microwave hookup and asking him to send my schedule for next week so I can plan with Mom when I’ll be available for kid-watching.

When I start an e-mail to Zoe, I see she’s online so we chat instead. Because of my crazy schedule, practically our whole friendship is conducted via computers and cell phones when we’re not at school, even though she lives pretty close. She’ll be going off to Seattle University soon, anyway. In some ways it feels like no big deal. We’ve had our good years and our bad years and always wind up as solid as ever with no major drama. In other ways, it seems we’ve already started to say good-bye.

A lot of our conversations are about memories.

Remember the summer we were volunteer zoo docents. Remember how Aaron Goldfarb broke both our hearts in sixth grade. Remember when we thought we lost Jack at the Exploratorium. Remember when I burned off Zoe’s bangs demonstrating the chemistry set my parents gave me for my twelfth birthday. (That was one of our bad years.)

Zoe ends the chat with
Keep it real, LoCo!
, which cracks me up.

My mood comes down again when I start replying to Ebb’s e-mail. I still feel like a major jerk about my last one to her. I’d tried to be more enthusiastic; then I messed up again.

Dear EB,

I can’t believe I said Florida. Not Florida. NOT. It’s no excuse, but would you believe the farthest (furthest?) I’ve ever been from home is Bakersfield? That’s a big, depressing city in central southern CA. But you probably know that, obviously being more acquainted with maps than I am.

Yeah, the microwave thing is kind of a funny story. I don’t know Keyon super well. His dad owns the company I work for.

That sounds a lot better than “I work at his dad’s sandwich shop.” Ebb is probably rich or at least upper middle class if she’s coming to Berkeley from the other side of the country. And I know that shouldn’t bother me or keep me from being myself, but I like the way “owns the company” sounds. Like Ebb will maybe get a different impression of me than I have of myself. I mean, she’s not
here
, she can’t see into my life, I can kind of be whoever I want with her for now.

He works there, too. We work together.

Reading Dr. Seuss to P.J. has affected my writing style. I backspace over that part.

He went to my school but I didn’t KNOW him know him, except in the way everyone knew him because he was this big jock and also really smart and not an ass. Wide receiver on the football team. Speaking of football, I should warn you: You have to get into it at least a little if you’re coming to Berkeley. You probably know about the rivalry with Stanford. It’s kind of a big deal. Personally I love it. We’re 49ers fans in our house even though they can be so unreliable and have broken our hearts too many times to count.

I’m tempted to talk about the 49ers of my childhood and my fondness for Jeff Garcia, but going on a sports tangent this early in our correspondence seems like a risky move.

So do you have a summer job or anything?

Or are you independently wealthy, hangin’ at the beach and sending me e-mails from your phone, while I continue to have the dumbest phone in the world and still have to text with the number pad?

Whoa. Bitter. Where’d that come from?

Okay! Have a good day tomorrow. Or whenever you get this!

Lauren

When my parents get home, I hang out in the living room with them a little, talking quietly so the kids don’t wake up. Dad has these almost comically huge bags under his eyes, and somehow when he’s tired his cheap clothes and DIY haircut make me sad. Other days, when his energy is up, I love those things about him, his self-sacrifice, and his willingness and ability to work as hard as he does and still be an awesome dad.

Our family’s bigness and its particular challenges from that bigness can be endearing sometimes. Or, I can get the kind of thoughts I had while writing Ebb’s e-mail—thoughts about wishing I really did know people who owned big companies, or that I had the mental space to get the
state
of my future roommate’s residence right, or had a better phone and more time to write to her.

The meltdown hovers.

I distract it by reenacting P.J.’s mystery food request for my parents.

They look at each other, brows furrowed, until finally Dad lights up. “Oh! A dippy egg.”

“Excuse me?”

Mom laughs. “You know. An over-easy egg. Then you cut the toast into strips and she dips it in the yolk.”

I roll my eyes. “Wow. Don’t know how I missed
that
.”

“You’ll catch on one of these days,” Dad says, and Mom makes some kind of a joke, too, but I’m not sure what because I guess I fall asleep, and the next thing I know one of them is squeezing my shoulder and helping me to my room, where I proceed to conk immediately out.

SUNDAY, JUNE 30

NEW JERSEY

There is a leftover dinner plate in the fridge when I get home from a long day of working for Tim—we sometimes work on Sundays—with a note that says,
Don’t wait up
. I’m too hungry to even bother to heat it, plus I don’t like what happens to chicken in the microwave, the way it seems to absorb some kind of metallic, deathly taste. So I take the plate into the den, plop down on the couch, and turn on the TV. There’s a
Housewives
of some kind or another on—like there always is—and I listen to a bottle-blonde braying as I chew. I’m almost afraid to check e-mail because it’s been days since I e-mailed Lauren and I know she’s not going to have written back yet and that I’ll continue to feel freaked out the way I have all weekend, like maybe I somehow pissed her off. Like I should have let the Florida thing go for now. She’d have figured it out on her own soon enough.

Sitting here on the couch alone while my mother is on yet another date with a man I will probably never meet, I think,
This is why I’m looking forward to popcorn popping
. To maybe staying up late talking and watching bad movies. To having a roomie. Most of the time at home
these days it’s me, myself, and I. I thought my mother would want to try to clock in more hours with her only child this summer—and, in fact, dreaded the prospect—but the shore real estate market is actually doing okay. It seems when people are broke they still take vacations, just cheaper ones, and she’s a real estate agent who does a lot of business in rentals. There are signs all over town for her agency, with her picture on them, and a part of me thinks she sees them more as ads for herself than for her professional services. They seem to work really well on both fronts—attracting clients, dates, and clients to date.

My phone is sitting on the couch next to me but I turn it over so that I can’t be distracted by any of its blinking lights. I’m not sure why, but tonight I actually
want
to be alone. Just me and the real housewives. But I’m halfway through another episode before it hits me that it
is
another episode and that I somehow missed the scene where the two women who were catfighting made up even though I’ve been sitting here the whole time. Something must be wrong with my brain because it is thinking about things it shouldn’t be. Things like Mark and the frog, neither of whom I’ve seen in a few days, and for some reason that has me bummed on both counts. Also, my dad and how maybe going to college in the same city where he lives is a bad idea. Because what if I can’t walk down the street without checking the face of every man who passes by to see if it’s him and whether he even recognizes me? What if I start stalking his art gallery like some crazy person? I close my eyes and try to picture his face and then—
bam
—it’s morning.

I wake up on the couch and flip my phone over. It’s blinking like crazy. There’s an e-mail from Lauren and I open it—before I read Alex’s or Justine’s or Morgan’s texts—and think,
Okay. Good. We’ve stabilized.

My mother is actually making breakfast and whistling and when I walk into the kitchen, I feel the need to ask, “Are we alone?”

“Of course we’re alone,” she says. She likes to believe she never brings men home but it’s not true. I used to keep count, used to daydream about one of the handsome ones becoming some sort of father figure. Back then my mom was still young enough, having had me right out of college, that I believed we could start all over again with a new father. I’d imagine us moving out of the condo—with its split-level layout that I always thought was cool until I spent time in houses that had big living areas that seemed to draw families together almost magnetically. I imagined us someplace bright and airy, someplace that wasn’t so cut up, so divisive, so annoyingly appropriate for my mother and me, who cannot seem to connect at all.

But I don’t fantasize about new dads or new houses anymore. Not when it’s easier to fantasize about leaving.

My mom puts a plate of scrambled eggs and some kind of fake bacon in front of me and I pick up a fork with sore hands. I spent my entire shift yesterday digging out rocks for a new garden bed alongside the house, hauling them away to the truck—even pocketing a small one whose weight had surprised me—then digging some more. I enjoyed the work at first, but when Tim said, “Well, no one’s here at the house today so we can make as much noise as we need to,” it all started to feel much more tedious. I
really
wanted to see Mark again, even if I was pretending I didn’t.

More proof: I’ve been looking at that silly rock on my windowsill way too often.

“I don’t know if it’s going to work out with this one,” my mom
says, and for an irrational second I bristle, thinking she’s talking about Mark. Then I come to my senses and study her. Something about her body language—loose, sexy, dreamy—makes me not believe her.

I ask, “Why not?”

She slides into the seat next to me at the table. “I think he’s married.”

“Mom!” I scold. I’m not sure whether I’m angrier that she went out with a married man or that she told me about it.

“What?” She sips her coffee. “You’re not a child anymore.”

I manage a bite. “Still…”

“Well, anyway. It’s too bad. I’d love me a nice hedge fund manager.” She shrugs, then says, “I’ve got a showing,” and heads down the hall for the bathroom.

I check my phone—there’s a new text from Alex confirming plans to meet up on the beach tonight; multiple texts from the girls asking me about a bonfire/fireworks party for the Fourth and do I want to go?—and then go back to reread Lauren’s e-mail. I start typing with my thumbs.

Dear Lauren,

Football? Really? Well, I’ll give it a try. My father was a big football fan, according to my mother—

(What I don’t type: who rants, when she’s drunk, about how pathetic it was that he thought being a football fan could hide the fact that he was gay, prompting me to roll my eyes and say, “Mom, gay men can like football!”)

—so maybe some appreciation has been passed down. Mostly, when I watch it, I think, Man, that’s got to hurt.

I have two jobs, actually. I babysit for this super-rich family when the parents want to go out, which is often. And I work at a landscaping company, where I basically haul rocks out of more super-rich people’s yards. But I am learning a lot, which is good because I’m going to be in the landscape architecture department at school. There aren’t that many programs nationally. My mother’s not entirely thrilled with the fact that it’s on the opposite coast but what can you do? Do you know what your major is going to be?

EB

PS My father owns an art gallery in San Francisco, called The Wall. Have you ever heard of it or maybe seen it?

I think about hacking off that PS and filing it away under TMI. But it’s not like I wrote, “And if you have, do you think you could maybe, I don’t know, go ask him if he’ll cough up a couple grand so I don’t have to take out such big loans? Thanks.”

I hit Send. What have I got to lose?