Thwonk (13 page)

Marcie ran back to the living room, sat the doll on the pink potty chair, and squeezed its stomach viciously. Streams of water squirted into the bowl, causing
the chair to play “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and Marcie to shriek, “Good dolly!” Peter handed her a Hershey’s kiss, which she smeared around the doll’s mouth before devouring it herself.

“Well,” I said, “so this is potty training.”

I gazed at Peter’s sculpted jaw. Over the weekend we were going to merge our CD collections, which was almost like being engaged. We had perfection right down to coordination in pizza toppings (we both adored veggie). This was an absolute sign from heaven that our love would last. We’d be munching Veggie Supremos when we were gnarled and middle-aged. But antiquity was light years away. The Dance of the Century was almost upon us.

The whole school felt its power. All anyone could get out of the King of Hearts Dance Committee was a knowing smile and a whispered assurance that
this dance
was going to blow the prom out of the water. Everyone who went would be changed forever; everyone who sat home would ache for what could have been. It would be my moment in the sun, the deliverance from years of grinding pathos and romantic devastation.

We cuddled close as Marcie whacked the chair. Not even potty training could extinguish our eternal flame. There was so much we had to learn about each other, so much distance that had separated our empty lives until now. I wanted to know every last scrumptious fact about him.

“Peter, tell me about the debate team.”

Peter shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“I mean
really
tell me. I want to know what it’s like in the heat of a debate when the clock is ticking and you’re up there and the whole team is counting on you to say something brilliant and the other guy has just scored a big point.”

He shrugged.

“Peter,” I tried again, “what kinds of things do you like to do? I mean, I love to go to museums and just spend time around all that good, rich art that’s lasted for centuries. I love sitting in front of it and seeing it from every angle. You can learn a lot about yourself that way.”

“I kind of like to hang out,” Peter said.

I took another approach. I said, “I’m definitely into gourmet food because my mother’s a chef and all, and I like to photograph just about anything that speaks to me about life. I try to photograph things that mean something to me, because that’s kind of how I see the world, through my camera.” I left lots of space here for him to jump in and say he’d love to see my work.

He didn’t.

I said that
art
was the door we open to understand ourselves. I said that
artists
, like debaters and athletes, have certain depth that other people can’t see. Peter fixed his ice-green eyes on me and motioned me to sit on his lap. I did, because there’s more to life than sparkling
conversation. He looked at me sincerely, like a dog about to be fed. I tried again.

“Peter, I’ve always felt that when two people really care about each other, one of the most important things they can do together is to—”

“Make dolly wet!” Marcie shouted.

I threw up my hands.

Marcie shook the doll at me. I stormed into the bathroom and filled it full.

“Go to it, kid.”

She ran back to her potty chair. I shuddered. Here was a child who would never be able to sit through
The Wizard of Oz
without having to go to the bathroom.

I had hardly lunged back into the living room when Jonathan pirouetted down unannounced, and did a three-point turn on Peter’s left shoulder.

“Good evening,” Jonathan chirped.

He circled Peter, looking him up and down like an internist. He felt his forehead, he tapped his chin. I shot Jonathan a Supremely Irritated Look from the corner of my eye. You have to be massively subtle to pull off invisible relationships.

Peter caught it. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing…”

Jonathan flew toward me, his wings beating in a blur. “I must tell you, my friend, that I do not like what I see.”

“
Then do something, please!
” I cried.

“Do what?” Peter asked.

I shouted that I didn’t know.

Peter said he’d do
anything
for me. His eyes glazed with blind love. He gripped my hand.

Jonathan said he would think about the dilemma. Marcie announced that it was time, once again, to “make dolly wet!” I yanked the doll’s head off and poured my can of 7-Up inside. Jonathan did a slow, ponderous spiral and spun backward out the window as the sounds of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” wafted through the living room.

It was past midnight; I couldn’t sleep.

I was eating a meat-loaf sandwich in my room, trying to picture what it had been like when Peter saw my face in his meat loaf and knew I was the one. I took a huge bite of sandwich. My mother made the best meat loaf in the world—dense, smoky, shouting with authority.

I had shouted for Jonathan twice since Peter drove me home. He hadn’t answered. He was probably lounging on Uranus, contemplating whatever minuscule thing was wrong with
my
boyfriend.

I played the messages back on the answering machine. Pearly wanted to do an in-depth blurb on me for the Valentine edition and wanted to know where Peter and I liked to hang out and what our favorite foods
were. Melissa Pageant invited me to her birthday party. I played that one back three times. Trish had left two messages. The first one said she’d asked Tucker to the dance—he said he hated to dance, but would go with her anyway. The second one asked if I’d had any further “incidents.” This depended on who you talked to.

I was really glad for Trish—she was going to the dance with someone mysterious who could benefit from in-depth psychoanalysis.

I sat on the floor of my bedroom and looked at my strapless red formal that I was going to look smashing in because the deep red offset my dark hair and made me look fiery, which is a good look for Valentine’s Day, all things considered.

I dangled my drop rhinestone earrings in the eerie glow of my halogen lamp. I felt the smooth container of my Ruby Rapture lipstick. I stuffed pink Kleenex and my extra nose inhaler into my sequined evening bag. I walked to the framed eight-by-ten photo hanging on my wall that my father had taken. It was a color shot of a cardinal on an evergreen branch eating from a home-made bird feeder. Dad had taken it the Saturday of last year’s King of Hearts Dance, two days after Robbie Oldsberg dumped me. Dad had wakened me up early that morning and we had driven to the country with our cameras. We’d trounced through snow-ladened forests, we’d crossed icy streams, not once talking about Robbie or Valentine’s Day or my heavy, broken heart, but everything
we did that day lightened me. Dad spooned peanut butter in a grapefruit rind and hung it by a pine tree for the birds to find. Two cardinals came and ate their fill. Dad and I blasted off a roll of film each through our zoom lenses. The birds flew away when I moved too close. We headed back home talking about light meters and color film, still yakking when we picked Mom up from work and went out for barbecue. Mom was asleep by ten, but Dad and I pushed through until two in the morning, watching old Marx Brothers movies and eating meat-loaf sandwiches. I knew exactly what he was doing and I loved him for it. It was the nicest day we’d ever spent together.

I touched the frame, wondering if my father would ever accept me as an artist.

Peter hadn’t seemed too keen about my art either. That hurt. Todd Kovich had never understood about my work. I’d had to drag him into my studio and force him to look. I could do that with Peter, of course; he would follow me anywhere.

I wanted him to care about my art without being pushed.

I wanted us to have a decent conversation.

I needed to talk to Jonathan. There must be something he could do. Peter was just in a sensitive stage of succumbing adjustment. I’d ask him for a teensy-weensy cupid alteration. How hard could that be?

Peter drove me to school Thursday, a shade too fast, in my opinion. He ran two red lights and almost hit a van of St. Ignatius nuns because he simply could not keep his eyes on the road for all the looking he was doing at me. At the intersection of Crosstown and Bernice I was shrieking, “
Watch the road!
” as he beamed at me like a thousand Christmas lights, screeched into the Ben Franklin parking lot, and rammed the Jeep to a sharp stop, causing the glove compartment to flop open and scores of parking tickets to flutter to the floor.

I stared at them in shock. “Peter, are these your tickets?”

He smiled and shrugged.

“You could get in trouble for not paying these!”

He scooped up the evidence. “My dad knows a guy who takes care of it.” Then he pulled me close and kissed me with unbridled emotion. It would have been a much better kiss if he’d paid the tickets.

At school we were mobbed.

We were asked to be on the Prom Committee and the Graduation Committee. We were asked to join the Young Republicans, the Young Democrats, the Young Independents, and the Young Undecideds. We were asked to suggest a gift for the senior class to give to the school at graduation. I proposed a cappuccino machine for the teachers’ lounge and received thunderous applause from the English Department. Deenie Wilcox asked if I would head a student panel discussing the Realities of Teenage Dating. The Student Council asked to display
my
photographs (no fewer than twelve) in the Student Center. This was the ultimate popularity nod. I was giddy with the thought.

“It will be my first private show!” I explained to Peter, who said “Uh-huh” and brushed a strand of hair from my cheek just like Todd Kovich used to do when the subject of my art came up.

“I need you to care about my work, Peter! This is what I plan to do for a living!”

He pulled me close. The hair on my arms tingled. “I care about
you
,” he whispered breathlessly.

You could hardly see my locker for the forest of notes taped to it about all the upcoming parties and important in-crowd gatherings. People came at us waving appointment books, trying to fit themselves into our blockbuster schedules. I was writing dates in textbooks, on Kleenex.

I was a megatrend in the making.

I was passing old friends at a distance because the new ones kept crashing in. Trish tucked a note in my fist saying to meet by the World Peace Bench after fourth period—we had to talk. I was trying to figure out which of my photographs should grace the walls of the Student Center when Pearly Shoemaker ran up to me, her eyes twinkling like Hollywood.

“I can’t tell you what it is, A.J., I swore I wouldn’t talk. But when you see it, well…it is the absolute ultimate expression!”

“What are you talking about, Pearly?”

“
You’ll see.
” She giggled, dancing off.

I forgot about meeting Trish at fourth period. I forgot about helping Nina Bloomfeld with her Art History paper. I almost forgot to vote for that lucky macho male who would be Ben Franklin High’s King of Hearts. I cast my vote (for Peter, of course). The King of
Hearts Dance Committee carried the hermetically sealed king-sized mayonnaise jars off to a soundproof, windowless room to tally the figures and swear a blood oath not to divulge the findings to
anyone
until Saturday night.

The mantle of royalty hovered above Peter’s dazzling head.

At fourth period Peter taped a flower to my locker. At lunch he gave me a box of designer chocolates in the cafeteria, right by Lisa Shooty, who flamed with envy. He said, “Sweets for the sweet,” which was really corny and I wished he hadn’t said anything because I thought about the reams of unpaid parking tickets and cleared two rows of buttercreams in under three minutes. At sixth period he gave me a silver bracelet. At seventh period he gave me his school jacket, at eighth period he tried to give me money.

“Just pick out a little something nice for yourself…,” he explained.

Gifts were always appropriate, but cash seemed tacky. I refused the money.

It happened during ninth period.