I passed.
That night Walter pulled me into the den and made me sit down on the couch next to him. It was after ten, and Mom and Dad were already in bed. He put his hot hand on top of mine. “Henry, you’ve been so unhappy for so long. Watching you’s been very painful for me. I hope you understand the chance you’re getting.” He squeezed my hand. In certain moods his voice is much deeper than you’d expect it to be—a cello full of sad advice. “Don’t take what your brother’s offered lightly. Remember—for David’s sake, but especially for Lucy’s—that you’ve got to stay damn near invisible. If you throw a Q-tip out and miss, don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ll pick it up tomorrow morning.’ You’ve got to pick it up now, even if it’s freezing cold and you’re cozy in bed. And don’t”—Were his eyebrows reaching out? Was his lower lip starting to shake? Finish! Finish! Please finish!—“don’t let yourself get stuck in feeling blue. Just your expression lately, I was telling your father, it’s felt like watching you give up.” And now he’d infected me! To keep from crying I pretended to have just noticed Olive lying next to me. “We love you so, so much, kiddo. Your father wants for you to be happy more than he wants anything. I do too. I mean that.” I stood up, feeling like I’d either been diagnosed with cancer or cured, and for a second, before I shook Walter off, he looked like he might kiss my hand.
* * *
Before I left I needed to break up with Wendy. It was something I’d known I had to do for months, but now I had a reason to do it. A reason better than not liking her. Wendy was the only person from high school that I still saw. She lived at home in Bethesda with her parents, just a ten-minute walk away, and—no matter how old we got, no matter how little encouragement I gave her—she’d always had a crush on me. Always since eighth grade, when she was a shy, pimply-foreheaded new girl from Long Island. She talked too loud and played with her toes in class. She asked me her very first week at school if I wanted to go see Dr. Giggles with her that Friday, and I lied that I couldn’t because I had to go over to dinner at my grandfather’s. I was lonely and embarrassed and I felt like she might be making fun of me in a way I wasn’t following. But she wasn’t. Later she found out I didn’t have a grandfather, and for the rest of the year she followed me around saying that I had to make it up to her, teasing but serious.
I never made it up to her during high school, but in winter, after being home alone for a few months, I called her. The best part of my weeks at home, until then, would be going to pick up fajitas from Rio Grande, imagining while I waited for my food that it was an apartment full of friends I was going back to and not my parents and Walter. One Friday in December I’d gone to the bar in Adams Morgan where the kids from my dorm at American went, but I ended up standing by the bathroom the whole night talking to the little brother of a guy I didn’t know, worrying that someone would ask me why I’d moved out. Suddenly Wendy—who I’d hugged at graduation and thought I might be saying good-bye to forever—seemed like my oldest friend.
And besides, I wasn’t feeling especially choosy. I looked defeated and fat-faced to myself whenever I walked past a mirror, and the idea that Wendy might look at me and see someone completely different seemed too incredible not to test. I spent all of high school pretending to look through my bag when Wendy walked by, waiting for someone who looked like a girl from a music video to fall in love with me, and all I got out of it was a prom night with Abbey Budder asking if I’d mind having the limo drop her off at her friend’s party. David says, and I think he’s probably right, that girls are like boxing: You’ve got to stay in your weight class or you’ll get flattened.
Wendy told me she was working part-time at a Starbucks downtown and the rest of the time she was acting, which meant taking acting classes at the Leland Rec Center. She’d deferred a year from the University of Wisconsin—she was hoping she’d have enough luck acting that she could stretch it into more than a year. I asked her when her next play was, and that was all it took. “You want to come? Seriously? It’s kind of stupid, but I like my part. Sit in the front left so I can see you.”
The play was about a jewel thief who falls in love with one of the women he robs, just because of her jewels and the picture on her bedside table. The robber leaves her a note, and she falls in love with him too, just because of the note, and they start meeting up and breaking into people’s houses together, and the woman’s big, golf-loving husband never notices. At the end the jewel thief gets caught, and the woman can’t stand to have her husband find out, so she testifies against the thief, but he still keeps writing her letters and sending her jewels even from jail. Wendy played one of the thief ’s last victims, and her only part was to come into her room, see that her things are gone, and say something to herself about how she bets her crook of a nephew did it.
I hadn’t seen her act since Chicago in tenth grade, but based on this, and on her frizzy hair and (I’d forgotten) the twisted way she walked, I didn’t think she was going to make it. Afterward I gave her a handful of flowers I’d chosen from the freezing fridge at the Giant next door. She hugged me so hard she knocked the wind out of me.
Once we’d been dating for a few weeks, she said, “Isn’t it funny that we weren’t even really friends in high school, and now this?” Another time, lying back on my chest, she said, “What if we moved to Las Vegas? Shut up! I’m serious! I could be the Vanna White in one of those magic shows, and you could do the music, write up all the different parts for everyone.” I had to swallow when she said things like that, and pretty soon I’d stand up to get a glass of water. If you want to know how you really feel about someone, there aren’t many quicker ways than having her lie on your chest and ask you to move to Las Vegas.
I decided I’d break up with her at her house. That way I’d be able to leave afterward and my parents wouldn’t walk in and ask what all that crying was about. I went over for dinner and her dad met me at the front door with a bear hug. “Henry Elinsky.” Just saying my name made Mr. Zlotnick smile. “Before we go in there, tell me what’s new, what you’ve been doing.”
“Oh, helping my dad. The same stuff. Just thinking what to do next.”
“And what’s it going to be? What’s a young, talented guy do next? It’s a great question. It’s a question I wish I still got to ask myself. You spend every day thinking about what you’re going to do, obsessing about what’s going to come next, and pretty soon … well, you’re fifty and you’ve got a daughter and a wife and a great guy coming over for dinner and that’s that. It’s a good life, though, a great life.”
Sometimes I wondered if Wendy’s dad had me confused with someone else. I’d give a halfway funny answer to a question and he’d laugh so hard, this high, terrifying yelp, that his wife would give him a look. Drunk at Wendy’s cousin’s wedding, he once asked me with a grin how long I was going to make him wait before I’d give his daughter one of these. He noogied my ribs until we’d both forgotten the question. He was rubbery, with curly black hair, and an older version of Wendy’s pointy face.
We had turkey with potatoes for dinner. These potatoes were one more reason I was looking forward to being broken up with Wendy. The first time I ever ate dinner at the Zlotnicks’, Sheila served them, and because I didn’t know what to say and because I’d decided I wanted to lose my virginity to her daughter, I said, “These are great—I should tell my mom about them.” Sheila jumped up and wrote the recipe on an index card in very careful handwriting, then put the card in an envelope and wrote, For Carol—potatoes à la Moises on the front. In the five months since, I’d never eaten a dinner there without those potatoes. And not only weren’t they good to eat, but they actually hurt to eat. By the time I’d cleaned my plate, the back of my mouth would be stinging like I’d been sucking all night on pennies.
In front of her parents Wendy turned into a little girl, but she would always catch my eye and wink at me, or else put a hand on my leg under the table. “What did you do today, Mom? Is your knee feeling OK?” And then a big smile. And her mom, her scratchy-voiced, hairy-armed little mom, would say, “Thank you so much for asking! Well, my knee doesn’t hurt as much. Not as much. It doesn’t feel good, but I think these exercises may be starting to really work. Let’s see what I did today. I went