again, until I reach the point when I realize how they help me live my life. At eight, I am on the cusp. I am sure there are so many things about Jason, about Jason’s mother, about the pandas in their pen, that I’m not seeing. But his mother’s love is strong enough that I don’t care about what I’m not seeing. Instead I want to live in the story of what is there.
The pandas don’t get the red licorice, but I do. When we leave the zoo, we go on a hunt for pink lemonade, and when we find it, I use my licorice as a straw, pretending it’s bamboo. When we go for lunch, I don’t notice any of the couples around us. I don’t measure our day against theirs. In due time, I will see the day as a conspiracy to milk romantics of their rose money. But that’s not how I learned it. That isn’t how any of us learn it. Our first valentines are never from someone we’re dating or have a crush on. Our first valentines are always like this.
My mother convinces the amused waitress to convince the chef to make our pizza so the red will be on top, the cheese underneath. When it arrives at our table, the chef has even added red peppers, shaped in a heart. I am delighted. (A wonderful word for a wonder-filled feeling, delighted.)
I can coast on my excitement for a while, but by the time we get home, I’m tired. I don’t remember napping, but I must nap, because I remember waking up. I remember it being light out, but just barely. I play for a few minutes with Bruno, Sally, and Lucy, and introduce them to Chewbacca, Han Solo, and C-3PO—although, not knowing these guys’ true names, I call them Rex, Harry, and Goldie, respectively. They are planning a valentine party of their own. Chewbacca Rex is a little in love with Sally, but Sally has no idea. Bruno is secretly jealous. Goldie C-3PO consoles him.
When the story has played out for as long as my attention span will allow, I decide to leave my bedroom. Quietly, I venture toward the kitchen, probably to retrieve more of Bruno, Sally, and Lucy’s heart-shaped friends. When I get to the doorway, I see my mom inside, but she doesn’t see me.
Here my memory takes hold. Here I contradict my earlier statement, because isn’t this an everyday moment, too? Why do I end up remembering it so many years later—why do I remember this woman, who I only know for one day? She is sitting at the kitchen table. A pink-frosted cake sits in front of her, the container of frosting still on the table beside it. She has a bag of candy hearts open, and she has been putting them onto the cake. I have caught her pausing in the middle of this task. A small green candy heart is held between her thumb and finger. The bag is right by her wrist. But she isn’t looking at the bag, or at the cake, or at me in the hall. She is looking at something that isn’t there. She is looking at nothing at all. She is seeing something without looking. She is in the room and she isn’t in the room. She is lost in her own private universe, a vast and small place that I can only see as it’s reflected in her body. It is not sadness I see. I would understand sadness. I see, instead, what an adult looks like when she is unmoored from gravity. When she forgets what gravity is like. When the pull of other universes is so faint that there is only the private universe left.
I remember this so well because one day I will understand it. What’s important isn’t what I notice—it’s this recognition beneath, and what comes next. Because the minute she sees me, gravity returns. The minute she sees me, the private universe expands. The minute she sees me, she comes back. And I think: love. I know then, without being able to articulate it, that love is the gravity.
She asks me if I want to finish decorating the cake. I ask her who it’s for. She tells me it’s for us . . . and Boba Fett, if he drops by.
I don’t want Boba Fett to drop by.
We eat two slices of the cake, and I’m sure we eat dinner, too. Afterwards, I help with the dishes and steal fingerfuls of icing from the cake that remains. Pink frosting is, to me, toothpaste’s super fun cousin. My mother, however, will not allow me to brush with what’s left.
Instead I am asked to use the less fun cousin before I change back into my Wookiee wear and jump into bed. I am not tired, not tired at all, but then my mother comes in and says she’ll read to me for a little while. I don’t remember what book it was—it almost doesn’t matter, because the sensation of being read to is so much more powerful than any individual story. Easing myself into her words allows me to loosen my grip on the fierce wakefulness I’d proclaimed when she entered the room. When she finishes, I am nearly in a dream state. But not quite, because I still remember her turning out the light, and then, by the glow of an R2-D2-shaped night-light, singing me off to sleep.
I could have panicked. I could have mourned ahead of time that I was going to lose this all the next day. I was old enough to know what was going on.
But I didn’t do any of that. I let myself take it as mine. I let myself enjoy it.
I let myself believe.
We give each other gifts. Red scarves, red mittens. Cards and licorice. Upside-down pizza. We give each other gifts, but really we give each other details. When days are gone, whether they be holidays or ordinary days, when you are nowhere near where you once were, the details have a way of staying. Trips to the zoo. The decorations on a cake. We keep them. They keep us. Bedtime melodies. Constellations of construction-paper hearts. I have added them up, and in my memory, I see love.
In high school, I was one of the good girls.
My parents didn’t know what to think. Every night, there’d be the parade of phone calls for their son. I’d slip out of the room, behind closed doors, to talk about friends and homework and relationships (rarely my own) and, every now and then, the meaning of life. They didn’t know all these girls’ voices like I did, so they were never really certain who was calling, or why. Either I had dozens of girlfriends or I didn’t have any at all.
The truth was most of my friends were girls. Mayling, Elana, Joanna, Carolyn, Lauren, and Marcie were the good girls. Lynda, Dvora, Rebecca, Susannah, Dina, Meg, and Jinny were the good girls who hit on the boy thing when we hit high school. Eliza, Jodi, Jordana, Jeannie, and Maryam were the good girls one grade below us. Jennifer, Sami, and Tracey were the good girls who didn’t do the group thing with us as much. There were boys, too . . . but there weren’t that many of them. The girls were the nucleus of my social life.
We didn’t talk about sex; we talked about love. We never, ever used party as a verb. Awkwardly mixed drinks and the occasional beer or wine cooler were as alcoholic as we got. Pot was a big step. Cocaine was unimaginable. We were the kids for whom VCRs had been invented. We watched When Harry Met Sally . . . over and over again and pondered its lessons like it had been filmed in Aramaic. The central question, of course, was: Can guys and girls really be friends? I liked to think I was the proof positive, because even though I fell for one of my female friends every now and then, friendship always managed to win out in the end.
It hadn’t yet occurred to me to like boys.
We good girls coveted our phrasings like they were SAT flash cards. We honed our wits like Dorothy Parker at an Algonquin lunch table. We were smart, and we knew it. We were dorks, and we knew it. But instead of hiding both things, we embraced them. We created our own form of popularity. In our town of Millburn, New Jersey, where the football team never won, this was surprisingly easy to do.
Many of the girls were in the Millburnettes, the girls’ singing group. If any of them dated, odds were that she’d date one of the Millburnaires. I myself failed my Millburnaire audition because I tried to make every song sound like “Bring Him Home” from Les Misérables. Mr. Deal, the fussy, testy diva of a chorus director, was half-appalled and half-amused. He gave me another chance, and I decided not to take it. I hadn’t wanted to wear the ultra-blue polyester Millburnaire outfit anyway.
Instead I became a Millburnette groupie. And a school musical groupie (memorably playing the one-lined doorman