is he leaving?”
“In a few weeks.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind between now and then.”
“No. He says he needs a break from the city.”
She raises an eyebrow in a way that hints at her suspicion: that the city is not all Will is trying to escape. If she says it, I will tell her she’s wrong.
But I won’t be sure about that.
And that’s the real reason I want to go away with Will this summer. Because ever since we got together three years ago, in college, our relationship has been about as stable as an Isuzu Trooper at eighty mph on a hairpin curve. In the rain. And wind.
When we met we were both juniors. Will had just transferred from a well-known Midwestern university to our upstate SUNY college. He had great disdain for the conservative, all-American mind-set that infused not just the school he’d left, but the family he was stuck with.
I could relate. Maybe that’s what first drew me to him. The tiny western New York college town I had grown up in bore striking similarities to the Midwest Will was fleeing.
There was the accent—the flat, wrinkle-nosed a that gives apple three syllables (ay-a-pple) whether you’re in the Chicago area or upstate New York.
There was my Roman Catholic religion, shared by every last person in my life but my friend Tamar Goldstein, the lone Jewish girl at Brookside High, who got to stay home while the rest of us went to school on the mysterious High Holy Days in October.
There was my sprawling extended Italian family, with its smothering traditions in which everyone was expected to participate: nine-thirty mass on Sundays, followed by coffee and cannoli at my maternal grandmother’s house and then spaghetti at noon at my paternal grandmother’s house. This is how every Sunday of my life began, and I continue to bear the scars aka cellulite everlasting.
Will is Protestant—his ancestors were from England and Scotland. He has no discernible accent; he has no cellulite. In his parents’ house, spaghetti sauce comes from a jar.
But he, like I, longed to escape the stranglehold of small-town life and had wanted to live in New York City for as long as he could remember. The difference was, he saw the State University of New York at Brookside as a giant leap toward his goal. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Brookside might as well be in Iowa. He figured it out by himself eventually, and ultimately skipped graduation in order to get the hell out of town as soon as possible.
When we met that first semester of junior year, he had a girlfriend back home in Des Moines, and I was living at home three miles from campus, with my parents. Our coming together was a gradual thing, and the blame for that lies squarely with Will. In retrospect, I see that he was alternately torn between cheating on his girlfriend and dumping her—and me as well—in favor of screwing around.
He used to talk about her freely to me, in a maddeningly casual way that suggested he and I were friends. If I ever popped by his apartment unannounced and he was talking to her on the phone, he’d make no attempt to hang up and would tell me casually, when he finally did, “Oh, that was Helene.” I figured that if he considered us more than friends (his word) who made out whenever we got drunk and ran into each other in a bar, he’d be a lot more furtive about his girlfriend.
So her name was Helene, and, naturally, I pictured her svelte and exotic.
Then Will went home for Christmas break and entrusted me with the keys to his apartment so I could water his plants. Yes, he had plants. Not marijuana plants, which were frequently grown in the frat houses near campus. Not a token cactus or one of those robust rubbery snake plants that you can pretty much shove into a closet and not water for a year and still keep thriving.
No, Will had regular house plants, the kind that needed sunlight and water and fertilizer.
Anyway, this key-entrusting episode was before we were sleeping together but after he’d gone for my bra clasp enough times for me to invest in something suitably flimsy. My usual was an industrial-strength closure with four hooks and eyes on an elasticized strip the width of duct tape.
I was dazzled that he trusted me not just with the plants he’d bought at the local Wal-Mart garden shop in September, but with the entire contents of the apartment he shared with two roommates. Didn’t he suspect that I would spend hours going through the plastic milk crates he kept in his closet, reading letters from Helene and searching for photos of her?
I don’t know—maybe he did suspect. Maybe he wanted me to snoop. The photos weren’t hard to find. They were tucked in the front cover of one of those cloth-bound blank books, along with a note from Helene that read: Use this as a journal while you’re away so that one day we can read it together and I’ll feel like I was there with you.
I gloated when I saw that the book was blank.
Not nearly as much as I gloated when I at last laid eyes upon the enigmatic Helene in a photo. I had known she was blond, a fact Will had mentioned more than once. And okay, I’ll give her the hair. It was long and shiny and parted in the middle. But other than that, she was ordinary—even more round-faced than I was and wearing red plaid Bermudas that did nothing for her hips and even less for her thighs. She wore them with a red polo shirt, tucked in.
I have never in my life worn a shirt tucked in, but if I were so-inclined, I sure as hell wouldn’t tuck it into red plaid Bermudas.
I stopped worrying about Helene when I saw that snapshot.
Sure enough, when Will returned from break to find his plants thriving, his plastic milk crates apparently undisturbed, and the plate of homemade cream-cheese brownies I’d left on his kitchen table, he informed me that he and Helene had broken up on New Year’s Eve. I, in my not-just-friends-but-not-quite-more role, wasn’t sure how to respond to that news. I remember ultimately acting sympathetic toward Will, and inwardly slapping myself a high five because I had won. I had beaten out Helene. The shadowy hometown girlfriend had been eliminated from the competition.
A shallow, short-lived victory, because I soon discovered that I had a long way to go. Even now, three years later, the finish line eludes me.
Kate asks, “Don’t you think you should tell Will you’re quitting your job and going with him?”
“I didn’t say I was definitely doing it. I just said that I wanted to.”
Dammit. Kate’s looking at me like I’ve just told her that I may or may not mow down everyone in this Starbucks with a sawed-off shotgun.
“I have to go now,” I decide abruptly, picking up my white paper cup and my giant black shoulder bag.
“Me, too,” Kate says, picking up her white paper cup and her giant black shoulder bag. “I’ll walk you over to the subway.”
Great.
One crosstown block and one uptown block of Kate’s attempts to sell me on the many glorious pros of summer in the city. Laughable, because I’ve already spent enough steamy, putrid-smelling urban August days to last me a lifetime.
I’ll have lived here a year Memorial Day, having spent the first few months sharing a Queens sublet with a total stranger courtesy of a Village Voice classified. Her name was Mercedes, and the few times I saw her in passing, she looked stoned. Turned out she slept all day while I was out temping, and was out all night doing God knows what—I tried to ask, but she was evasive. We both moved out on Labor Day when the actor who had sublet us the apartment returned from summer stock. I never saw her again, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up on an episode of COPS someday, vigorously denying something.
Thanks to my summer in a relatively affordable borough, I scraped together enough money to land a studio of my very own in Manhattan, in the East Village. Way east. Like, almost as far east as you can go and not be on the FDR Drive or in the river. The apartment has that kind of grimy and depressing thing going on. Like the Kramdens’ place in those Honeymooners reruns on Nick At Nite, it