The Marriage of Sticks (2 page)

Zoe was different. Compared to my life since high school, Zoe Holland’s had been a shooting gallery, with her as the target. She dropped out of college freshman year and married when she found out she was pregnant. The culprit was a vain little scorpion named Andy Holland who, three months after they were married, started sleeping around with whomever he could find. Why he wanted to be married neither Zoe nor I could ever figure out. They had two children in quick succession.

Then, out of the blue, Andy announced one day that he was leaving. Zoe was suddenly on her own with two babies and no prospects. The fact that she prevailed was inspiring because nothing she had done before prepared her for it.

She had been one of the queens of our high school class—high grades, lots of friends, and the captain of the high school football team, Kevin Hamilton, was her love. Everyone looked at Zoe and sighed. But she was such a nice person that almost no one resented her good fortune.

She was an optimist and, even in the midst of her later torment, believed if she worked hard and remained kind, things would improve.

She took a couple of part-time jobs and struggled through. When her kids were old enough to go to school, she enrolled in community college. There she met the next disaster in her life, a handsome guy who began beating her up a few months after he moved in.

Suffice it to say, Zoe’s philosophy wasn’t correct and throughout the ensuing years more bad happened to her than good. By the time the class reunion rolled around, she was living in a sad little house in our old hometown; one of her children did serious drugs and the other didn’t have much to say for himself.

I took the train up from Manhattan. Since my parents moved to California, I hadn’t been back to Connecticut in a decade. The ride that hot Friday afternoon was the beginning of a trip to the past I was ambivalent about making.

I hadn’t seen Zoe for years, although we spoke on the phone now and then. She was waiting for me at the station looking happy and exhausted in equal measure. She had put on weight, but what really struck me was how large her breasts were. In high school one of our constant running jokes was how neither of us had much in that department. Now there she was in a black polo shirt that stretched in ways that said it all. I must have been pretty unsubtle in my staring because after we hugged, she stood back, put her hands on her hips and asked in a proud voice “Well, what do you think?”

There were people walking by so I didn’t want to say anything too obvious. I shook my head and said, “Impressive!”

She hugged herself a moment and grinned. “Aren’t they great?”

We got into her old Subaru station wagon and drove through town. All the way to her house she rhapsodized about new boyfriend Hector, who was the greatest thing to happen to her since she didn’t know when. The only problem was, Hector was married and had four children. But his wife didn’t understand him and…You can take it from there.

She had the look of a saint in a religious painting. I kept looking from her face to those movie-star breasts and didn’t know what to say or think. Married Hector held her life in his hands but she seemed thrilled. From the sound of it, she was just happy someone was interested enough to
want
to hold her life, take the weight from her while she rested up.

Her house was so small that it didn’t have a driveway, so we parked on the street in front. At first glimpse, it was the kind of house you see in biographies of famous people as the home where they were raised, or the first one they owned when they were starting out, poor but enthusiastic.

She had arranged for her kids to be away for the weekend so we could have the place to ourselves and not worry about them.

As she fumbled through her keys searching for the one to the front door, I felt a momentary squirt of fear go up me. Suddenly I didn’t
want
to go into this house. Didn’t want to see what was there. Didn’t want to see the concrete results of my friend’s life on the mantelpiece, the walls, the coffee table. Things like photographs of kids gone bad, souvenirs from places where she’d been happy for a few days, a cheap couch that had known a million hours of unmoving asses watching TV with no real interest.

But I was completely wrong and that broke my heart even more. Zoe had a wonderful home. Somehow she had distilled all of her love and care into those few small rooms. Walking through them, admiring her taste, sense of humor, and talent for putting the right things in exactly the right places, I kept wondering, Why
hasn’t
it worked for her? Why has everything gone so wrong for such a good person?

There was a small backyard that she’d saved for last to show me because there sat the surprise. Pitched in the middle of it was a familiar brown tent that made me laugh loudly as soon as I saw it.

“Is that
it
?”

Zoe was beaming. “The exact same one! I’ve saved it all these years. Tonight we’re going to camp out again!”

When we were teens, our weekend ritual in the summer was always the same: set up this tent, stock it with junk food and fashion magazines, then spend the night inside gabbing and dreaming out loud. Our houses belonged to our parents, but this old Boy Scout tent in Zoe’s backyard was ours alone. Her brothers were banned from it and we took swift action when they tried to invade. What we talked about in there all those nights was as secret and important as the blood moving through our veins.

I walked over and touched the tent flap. As I held it between my fingers, the rough familiar cloth was an instant tactile reminder of a time when life still made sense, limits were for old people, and James Stillman was the most important person on earth for me.

“Look inside.”

I bent down and peeked into the tent. Two sleeping bags lay on the floor with a Coleman lamp between them. There was a box of Zagnut candy bars.

“Zagnuts! My God, Zoe, you’ve thought of everything!”

“I know! Do you believe they still make them? Oh, Miranda, I have so many things to tell you!”

We went back into the house. She showed me to her daughter’s room, where I changed into cooler clothes. Afterwards she suggested we take a drive around town before dinner and have a look at our old stomping grounds.

Far more disturbing than any spook house at an amusement park is a ride through the old hometown if you’ve been away for years. What do you expect to see? What do you want to see? Having been away so long, you know it’ll be different. Still, seeing the inevitable changes makes quick deep slashes across your soul. Loss, loss. Where are all those places I once was?

Iansiti’s Pizza Parlor was gone, replaced by a store with a postmodern facade that sold CDs. There were only records when I lived here. LPs,
not
CDs. I thought about all the slices of pizza with extra cheese and pepperoni we’d eaten in Iansiti’s, all the dreams and teenage hormones that once filled that dumpy place with its stained menus and bunch of fat-bellied Italian cousins in T-shirts eyeing us from behind the counter.

“Sometimes when I’m driving down these streets, looking at our old hangouts, I think I see myself inside them.” Zoe chuckled and slowed for a yellow light in front of the bank where James’s mother had worked.

I turned to her. “But
which
you? The one you were, or the you now?”

“Oh, the one I was! I always think of myself as seventeen here. I’ve never gotten over the fact I’m twice that age but still living in this town.”

“Don’t you feel strange going by the old places? Like your parents’ house?”

“Very. But when they died, so did it. A house is the people who live there, not the building. I just wish I hadn’t sold it when the market was so bad. The story of my life.”

We drove by the high school, which despite some new buildings still looked as glum as ever. Past the town park, where, one fifteen-year-old summer night, I almost lost my virginity. Then down the Post Road to the Carvel ice cream stand where James and I sat on the hood of his old green Saab and ate vanilla cones dipped in heated chocolate.

Until that moment, I hadn’t been able to get up the nerve to ask Zoe
the
question, but seeing that cherished Carvel stand was a sign it was time. As casually as possible I asked, “Is James coming to the reunion?”

Zoe looked at her watch and dramatically blew out a breath like she’d been holding it for minutes. “Phew! You went a full hour without asking. I don’t know, Miranda. I asked around, but no one knew. I’m sure he knows about it.”

“I didn’t realize till we started driving around that this whole
town
is haunted by him.” I turned to her. “I didn’t know how I’d react coming back, but more than anything it’s James everywhere! I keep seeing places where we were together. Where we were happy.”

“Miranda, he was the love of your life.”

“When I was eighteen! I
have
done other things since then.” The tone of my voice was stiff, prissy. I sounded too much on the defensive.

“Not as much as you think.” She grinned and threw me a quick look. “High school is a terminal disease. It either kills you while you’re there, or waits inside your soul for years and then comes back to get you.”

“Come on, Zoe, you don’t believe that! You had a wonderful time in high school.”

“Exactly! And that’s what killed
me.
Nothing was ever better than high school.”

“You sound so cheerful about it.”

She chuckled. “Right now I’m looking forward to the reunion because in those people’s eyes, no matter what’s happened to me in the last fifteen years, I’ll always be Zoe the golden girl. The cheerleader with the great grades and the boyfriend who was captain of the football team. And you’ll always be Miranda Romanac, the good girl who shocked everyone senior year by going out with the baddest boy in school.” She slapped my knee.

In a bad Irish accent I said, “Aye, and God bless the boy!”

She raised a hand as if it held a glass and she was offering a toast. “And God bless Kevin. I’m also looking forward to this because I hope he’ll be there. And he’ll be absolutely wonderful, sweep me off my feet and save me from the rest of my life.”

My heart filled so quickly that I couldn’t catch my breath. It was exactly the way I had been thinking for weeks.

I met James Stillman in geometry class. God knows, I
knew
about him before; he had a reputation fifteen miles long. He mesmerized innocent girls into his bed. He’d once stolen a pair of skis from the town sport shop, then had the chutzpah to return there the next day to have the edges sharpened. He and his friends were reputed to have burned down the abandoned Brody house during one of their infamous parties there. All told, James was not interested in being a solid citizen.

A group of typical thugs had usually slouched around our school halls wearing gaudy leather jackets and intricately piled hairdos that looked like hood ornaments, but James Stillman’s brand of bad was planets away from those human clichés. What fascinated me was his great, singular style when I didn’t even really know what that word meant yet. Despite his reputation, he dressed like a preppy, in tweed jackets, khakis, and loafers. He listened to European rock groups—Spliff and Guesch Patti—and was even rumored to love cooking. When he was going out with Claudia Beechman, he had a bouquet of yellow roses delivered to her in gym class on her birthday. Like most of the girls in the high school, I watched him from afar, wondering if all the things said about him were true. What
would
it be like to know him, date, kiss him? But that was academic because I knew the thought of someone as colorless and well behaved as me would never even cross his mind.

“What’d he say?”

Only after a
thud
inside my brain did I realize that James Stillman had asked
me
a question. He sat behind me in geometry class but only because seating was alphabetical. Before I had a chance to digest what had happened, he repeated the question, this time adding my name to it.

“Miranda? What’d he say?”

He knew me. He knew who I
was.

The teacher had said the earth was an oblate spheroid, as I dutifully noted in my book. I turned and said, “He said the earth’s an oblate spheroid.”

James watched me intently, as if whatever I said he’d been waiting all morning to hear.

“A what?”

“Uh, an oblate spheroid.”

“What’s that?”

I was about to say, “Like an egg that’s been leaned on,” but something inside said shut up. I shrugged instead.

A small slow grin moved his mouth up. “You know, but you’re not admitting it.”

I panicked. Did he know I was playing dumb just for him?

“It’s okay to know things. I just know different stuff.” He smiled mysteriously, looked away.

After class I kept my eyes down and gathered my books as slowly as possible. That way there would be no chance of walking out of the room at the same time he did.

“I’m sorry.”

I stood still and closed my eyes. He was behind me. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t need to because he came around and stood in front of me.

“Sorry about what?” I couldn’t look at him.

“About what I said. Do you think you’d ever want to go out with me?”

All I remember about that moment was I could actually
feel
fate’s wheels turning inside me. In the split second before I answered, I knew everything would now change, no matter what.

“You want to go out with
me
?” I tried to make it light and sarcastic so I would be in on his joke if there were one.

His face was expressionless. “Yes. You don’t know how much I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

We were inseparable for the rest of the year. He was everything I wasn’t. For the first time in my life, I learned with increasing joy that
different
could be
complementary.
We had worlds we wanted the other to see. Somehow those very different worlds fit together. Remarkably, we never slept together, which was one of the great mistakes of my life. James was the first man I ever loved with an adult heart. To this day I still wish he’d been my first lover instead of a handsome forgettable goof I said yes to a month after I got to college.