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“SWEET CHERRY, MAKE IT AWFUL”
—HOLE
It was a Tuesday, a fact that, Lorraine mused—as she did about most days—didn’t lend it any particular distinction from the other days of the week.
“Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday.” She sang it until the two syllables were robbed of any significance, and then sighed at herself in the mirror, frustrated that it never would mean anything. Not just those two syllables, but any of it. Of her twenty-eight years on this earth, she’d spent twenty of them in love with Tommy. And with little exception, she’d gotten the same disappointing results every day. That realization hit her every morning that he wasn’t next to her; filling her tummy with the same hollow feeling. And after that came the familiar sinking idea—that no one seemed to let her forget—that she didn’t have anything to show for herself as a result of her inability to let go of him once and for all.
Regardless of what it was called, on Tuesday evenings Lorraine and the same old people she’d hung out with for God knows how long did break their regular routine of hanging out in the corner of the schoolyard at the abandoned elementary on Sixty-fifth Street, and went to the Bay Ridge Bowl instead. But, since she’d done the same thing every Tuesday since she was fourteen, it probably would be considered routine of its own. What was worse, on that particular freakin’ Tuesday, it was raining. And Lorraine didn’t like to get her hair frizzy.
“Lorraine, just come on already. Tommy is gonna be there! So your hair’s gonna get wet! Big woop. All the girls are wearing it all frizzy and wavy like that in the city these days anyway.”
“Do I look like a city beeyatch to you?” Lorraine wasn’t having it. Chrissy always tried to get her to do what she wanted her to do by dangling Tommy in her face. What was the freakin’ point, though?
She thought of that first night—the first time Tommy himself had dangled hope in front of her. She didn’t know if it had made things better or worse. God, it was the only time she’d ever wished on a stupid star. And when they’d reached Tommy’s house with nothing but a car alarm in the distance, one locust rubbing its legs together, or whatever they did to make that noise, everything had stopped. The whole world, she was sure, had stopped spinning, the guys on the corner had stopped throwing that stupid football, her mother had even probably stopped yelling at her dad for not making enough money to get them back to Italy, as Tommy turned around abruptly to face her. After a second it had been a lot to take—the weight of him looking so directly at her like that; the fact that everything she’d always wanted was now glaring at her with so much force.
“You want to kiss me, don’t you, Lorraine?”
They were fifteen then! And for the love of God, yes! She’d wanted him to kiss her, had never wanted anything else for as long as she could remember. Would she take it back if she’d known how things would be now?
She’d dreamed of that moment for so long, with her mother’s voice shrill in the background shouting, “Johnny! Would it kill you to clean up your dishes for once, you good for nothing piece of shit!”
(For the record, her father was not a piece of shit, nor was he good for nothing. But you couldn’t tell that to Lorraine’s mother, just as you couldn’t tell Lorraine’s father that her mother meant any of it. He was so smitten with her, the words changed to sweet music before they reached his ear. At least that’s how he’d described it to Lorraine. If only Lorraine and her brother had the power to hear the sweet sounds their father did!)
And there it had actually been happening—with the bonus of her mother’s voice being, if slightly, out of earshot. Thinking quickly, she’d realized the best move would be to stay quiet. Make him work for it a little. She’d already learned about what men wanted, for crying out loud—she and Chrissy had watched both Knots Landing and General Hospital religiously. So she’d stared him down. And just like that they’d stood, daring each other in their own way, silently accepting the mutual challenges. Seconds, minutes passed, and still, nothing had happened. Lorraine’s limbs had throbbed with the absence of breath. She’d known she’d never survive if her dreams were quashed this close to possible realization. The throbbing had turned into a smoother, easier beat, her temperature rose—still nothing. Finally, when it seemed she’d lost her chance, she turned her head to go, to follow the same disappointed route she had hundreds of times—God, since she was ten years old! What was one more night? She had already been trying to console herself.
She’d started walking.
And he’d made her pay for it. He’d made her think he was going to let her go—down two streetlights, or five twisted shrubs, or four driveways, or twelve cracks in the sidewalk, whichever way she felt like counting how far she slept from Tommy each night.
But not two light posts later he grabbed for her hand with a roughness she’d not attributed to him before, staring her down like that again, making her throat go dry.
She was looking out her window to that very spot right now! If only she didn’t think of it every time! But she did! For the love of God, she did! And she could see it, like a movie playing out right in front of her from her balcony seat. Sick! She was sick! She could remember every moment: She’d stood there—her hair so big it could engulf Tommy’s head entirely—and she’d thought, Oh my God. It’s happening. Take any experience she’d ever had, times it by ten, add it to a million, and still...it had nothing on that moment. How could she have desired someone so much? What had she known of it back then? But she had known! She’d been the Firestarter, anything she touched a finger to would’ve gone up in flames.
He’d looked down at her mouth until it felt like he’d kissed it already, so hot did her lips feel by then. She’d say, when she told the story, to the one person she told it to no less than 10,000 times—she’d say, “Chrissy, I swear on my great-grandmother’s grave, it was like he kissed me without kissing me.”
Fourteen years later, and Chrissy thought she could still get Lorraine out by putting the idea of Tommy in her head. Lorraine scowled. It was true, she could! But she felt more comfortable attributing her change of heart to her desire to try the wavy hairstyle. Chrissy was right, she had just seen one of those chic city beeyatches on the subway wearing her hair like that, the kind of girl who only came to Bay Ridge because she’d heard they stock Michael Kors in the Century 21 on Eighty-sixth. “But that’s the only reason,” she told Chrissy. The only reason.” She repeated it, as her voice trailed off. She didn’t even believe herself.
As she retraced that route now on the way to Bay Ridge Bowl, in the heavy grayness of the early evening, past the five twisted shrubs, some of which really weren’t all that twisty anymore, Lorraine felt the sensation that time was racing ahead and she wasn’t catching up. After all, shouldn’t she have more than this by now? Some of her friends had married. One just had a baby, for heaven’s sake! She’d held it in her own hands, ran her finger down the soft baby arm, choking back the tears that blurred her vision with the distinct feeling she’d never have this for herself. If there were a way to flick a switch and just turn it off for good, maybe that would be a different story. But even that remote, unrealistic scenario couldn’t play out too far in Lorraine’s mind, because she wasn’t so sure she would turn her feelings for Tommy off, even if she could.
You see, he had kissed her that night, fourteen years ago. He’d (finally!) kissed her and kissed her, each time pulling her in deeper and deeper like he couldn’t get enough of her. Oh, the way his hair actually felt—thick like a lawn, but soft at the sides where there wasn’t gel and hairspray holding up perfectly imperfect spikes. He was skinnier back—all the guys were—but his arms had been strong as she felt them around her, and what a feeling! The veins, their green—it was wild what she had noticed! She’d locked every detail away in her mind, storing them in a place where she could always return.
They’d sat under a tree in his backyard. Lorraine could see the crippled tops of its branches now, and her breath caught in her throat the same way it had on that night. It had been an old tree—even back then—and half the boughs were completely bent over. Under there they had been secluded, in their own little Tommy-and-Lorraine pod. To this day, she could remember exactly the sound of the raindrops hitting the leaves, the sound of a leaf giving into gravity and pouring a bunch of raindrops down onto the ground at once. In fact, with the rain now picking up its ferocity, she thought she heard that same sound. It had been humid that night in their tree world, and they had been soaked through, their clothing stuck to them like it was never coming off.
She’d thought she’d known what it was like to be hungry for Tommy before, but actually having him...once she’d gotten a taste of that, she’d been STARVING, pulling at him and grabbing at his hair and the back of his neck and his soaking shoulder and the very bottom of his back, right at his jeans waistband. After that very first kiss, after the smoothing over of each other’s tongues and the tasting of each other’s lips, and the grabbing so tight that you don’t even realize, he’d looked at her and she could see what it was about Tommy that made her love him—the very same thing that kept her so paralyzed now. In him, there was knowledge of a Lorraine that no one else shared. In those tiny glimpses he’d tossed at her over the years like bits of confetti on New Year’s Eve, she saw it was possible that she could be so much more. And then, finding herself face to face with him looking at her full on, she’d seen it more deeply. The way she’d read his look, the things she saw in his chocolaty eyes with their watery glaze, so big and framed with thick black lashes, and his boxer cheekbones jutting out right underneath, those were things she couldn’t get enough of seeing. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Lorraine.”
She resolved now, for the millionth time, not to look up at his window as she passed by his house on her way to meet Chrissy at the bowling alley. Their lives, their words echoed there. Despite that, certain weeks she could will herself not to look. She would say to herself, Lorraine, under no goddamned circumstances are you to look at that boy’s house! Don’t look for the pearly rock of his snake tank in the window. Don’t look for the American flag spread across the top third of the window. Don’t check to see whether his 2000 Mustang GT convertible in K7 Bright Atlantic Blue, with 17 inch 5 Star rims is there or not. Just don’t do it. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Painful as it was, she could walk by. She could let the echoes of their words just roll over her, and not pierce through the way they sometimes could. Somehow she now turned the corner without looking at Tommy’s house.
“Home free,” she said to the garbage pails whose lids were sloppily tossed in the street. She was proud of herself, knowing all the while it wouldn’t last, couldn’t last. She was kidding herself was all. But what other games had she to occupy her time?
That very first night, he’d hooked her. Every day and night after that, Lorraine had done everything with Tommy’s drippy look in mind—with the image of herself she saw reflected in it, in mind. She would wear this lacey underwear and that bra and spray this eau de parfum and chew on this breath mint, and arrange her hair up away from her neck on that side. Anything and everything to be that Lorraine! To be looked at as that Lorraine! To have him say something like he’d said before, “I’d never noticed, Lorraine, how your neck curves like that, so soft up beneath your hair.” And he’d put two fingers there, pulling the tiny hairs at her nape between them, over and over and over. Deep down, she didn’t want to be Lorraine. She wanted to be Tommy’s Lorraine.
They’d kissed like that every night for two weeks, and it had rained then, just as it was now, unrelenting and continuous, like a sheet of water...running, running. She’d been afraid for it to end—all of it—Tommy, the rain. She would stay late. Too late, until Lorraine’s mother would yell, “Madre Mia! Where is my daughter? Where is my daughter?”
Her mother would scold her: “Do you want the whole neighborhood to hear me screaming for my own daughter that way?”
She walked now two blocks past their own with a heavy heat, but managed to keep herself in that far off place from all those years ago. On one of those late nights, those beautiful, stormy nights, under those dreamy tree boughs, the rain had cleared and revealed the moon high above and stars intermittently visible in the slight breeze that swung the branches just the slightest bit to the left or the right. They’d lain facing each other, with their sides on the moist grass.
It had been silent some time and Lorraine had been taken by the dramatic, change in the landscape. “It’s true, I guess, what they say—you can’t appreciate the good weather without the bad.”
Tommy had looked into Lorraine’s eyes in that way again, like there was a deep truth in there. “I never met anyone like you Lorraine Machuchi. You are so different.” He’d said it in a casual way she never heard him use with other people. But to them, he was the Tommy people wanted to know, the hot guy with the tight shirt and the dreamy brown eyes. That Tommy didn’t let people know him like Lorraine had.
Where was he, so deep in those eyes? People had wanted to know, but Lorraine already did. She’d known just exactly where he’d been taken. And when he took her there, she could see that he didn’t understand science too well, and wasn’t sure if the way his father hit him sometimes wasn’t more than he should. Tommy was real, more real than anything else she could see around her. He mattered. Math class didn’t. Her mother’s yelling didn’t. But Tommy...well he did, unmistakably, he did.
For Lorraine, it had been as if her whole life was happening to her right then and there and she knew she could never want a thing more. When she thought of it now even, when she would see him at the Bay Ridge Bowl, it was unmistakable to her that they were joined somehow. It was the wanting that first hooked her in—the highs after the lows of it, the satisfaction of finally getting there, having him look at her like that again. Everything else would melt away on a drift of slower breaths and higher consciousness. And he’d say, “Ahhh, Lorraine,” like she was the antidote to it all.
Those two weeks had ended just as abruptly as they’d begun. One night, after the group split up, he’d given her a painfully friendly kiss on the cheek, and with his hands in his back pockets, walked the cracked concrete path up to his front door. At first Lorraine had thought he’d come back, that he’d pop out from the front door and hoot, “Just kidding!” And she’d waited and waited. But after an hour it had become obvious that he wasn’t coming out. “Moron!” she’d screamed at herself, at the hateful moon peeking through the trees outside Tommy’s house, where she’d sat with her feet in the flooded gutter, water rushing down into the sewer so loud it sounded like the ocean. But she couldn’t help herself. She’d gone up to ring the bell. Tommy’s mother had answered.
“Oh, hello Lorraine. I’ll go get Tommy.” Lorraine had tried to gauge something in Tommy’s mother’s tone—anything at all!—but she was warm and welcoming as she’d always been. Lorraine had waited there, looking into the deep weave on the carpeted staircase that led up to Tommy’s room. Brown, brown; it seemed the whole house was his gaze, that the slippery chocolate of him had spilled out all over it and would overtake her. She’d never survive.
And then he’d appeared at the front door, and Lorraine had started to let her breath out, the breath she’d been holding in all the long hours by the oceanic sewer, because his look was now completely empty. It didn’t say anything.
“What’s up Lorraine?” he’d asked like an acquaintance she’d only just met. The chocolate of his eyes had turned to sturdy, waterproof leather. Nothing was getting in or coming out. Suddenly the whole house repelled her.
She didn’t know what to do or say. And so she’d just excused herself. “I’m sorry. I thought I left something with you.”
“Nope. Nothing,” he’d said.
And so she’d run, hard, harder, home and retreated to the memory of him that was more real than this unbelievable thing that had just happened. Inside Lorraine, the thing Tommy had found there, she felt it cramp up and shatter into a trillion pieces.
That had been the first of many endings for Lorraine and Tommy, and each time, the in-between grew more deeply aggravated. When you pick at a scar, you leave no chance for it to heal. If you could somehow make yourself forget it was there, it would slowly blend into your skin, never to be seen again. That’s what she’d been told, anyway. But no matter how hard the fall, how deep the wound, she always took the leap when his eyes opened up to her again, let her in, saw her. This time! She’d always think that this time it might just last.
She wasn’t surprised to find herself walking aimlessly by the bowling alley, hating herself all the while she indulged her thoughts. In her mind’s eye their arms were interlocked as they glided in and out of the world—restaurants and weddings and their friends’ basements and backyards and pools. The angles of their elbows seemed solid, unbreakable, when she remembered them that way.
“Lorraine, pain, strain, drain...boy, that’s a depressing name you’ve got there Lorraine.” He’d said this to her when they’d been barbecuing in Petey’s backyard. That had been two years ago, and their fingers were laced together—why did this always look so fantastic? This weave, the pattern of them?
“Crane—that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Used in building new, beautiful things. How could that be bad?” It had been a stretch.
“What about Tommy?” she’d tried to change the direction of the conversation. “Tommy Salami,” she said. “That’s bad for your cholesterol.”
And she’d smiled, from teeth to eyes to hairline, the way girls tried to get him to do. “I bet you want some Tommy Salami....”
She’d smacked him—playfully of course. But then he’d turned serious, his swimming eyes at the peak of their power, the tide of him high. Everyone else was scenery.
Fears of the end aside, she’d been dizzy with happiness then, not really experiencing life so much as feeling around for everything through the haze of it. She could stay up in her tiny bed for hours just thinking of the way he’d had trouble saying good night, the way he’d said, “I just can’t let go of your hand Lorraine,” and then how he’d looked down at it as if it must be true. Please be true, she’d thought.
He’d never used ordinary words such as “I love you.” For them, there were other words. “You are everything, Lorraine.” And she was bolder and brighter still. A Broadway marquee, she’d been, dressing at the foot of his bed. How could she have known it would all come crashing down again?
So different than she felt now! She knew at that moment, as she walked heavy-footed, the only way she could muster with her jean cuffs so weighed down with rain, back toward the bowling alley, soaked all the way through to her matching lace bra and panty set by the now hard-falling rain, that she’d wasted her life. Her whole fucking life—for Tommy. And she’d given him up—ten, fifteen, twenty-five hundred times. Because he obviously doesn’t love you. Moron! But she always went sneaking back, hurling rocks up at his window at midnight if he asked her to, meeting him wherever he’d begged, until the frowns said the whole neighborhood knew anyway.
Standing outside the bowling alley now, her hair was wavy and messy. It wouldn’t dry, not with water coming up so hard from the sidewalk it felt like knives stabbing at her ankles. She forced herself to go inside, into the bathroom, where she looked at herself in the cloudy, cheap bathroom mirror. Despite how terrible she felt inside, she did look good like this. Sexy. You are everything, Lorraine. No, she couldn’t believe it now. But she forced herself to walk outside. Walk toward the lanes where she knew she would see him.
All the cute guidos wore tight shirts, but Tommy’s were the tightest. Not only Lorraine, but all the girls appreciated it. All he had to do was flash that freaking smile (which she personally knew he owed to Crest White Strips—a fact he’d revealed when he was particularly down on himself. Teeth whitening was one of the tiny ways in which he tried to make himself feel better about life in general) and Tommy could get a girl to come right over and make a fool of herself, proudly running her fingertips over her hair, each thinking herself the bravest, most novel, the first to ever do that, to walk right over that way.
At nine on the dot he smiled at a girl who looked as if she charged by the hour (and not a lot at that), who wore glittery gold chains and hoop earrings and leopard in at least three different representations. On cue the girl came over. It wasn’t five minutes until he bought her a strawberry daiquiri in a plastic cup with a Chinese umbrella, and had his hand laid out far enough up her thigh that you knew she was in for it.
Tommy never bowled. Despite the shockingly colored posters advertising special discounts, taped up half-heartedly over the shoe rental desk, barely anyone did—except for the really old guys that lived in the senior home down on Seventy-second and the really geeky high school guys with the pocket protectors who didn’t even bother trying to skirk their stereotype. There were at least twenty people in Lorraine’s group, who hung out at the Bay Ridge Bowl on Tuesdays. It was two-for-one drink night was why. Even before that, they were drawn by the night manager named Decker who always served the underagers as long as they paid him and turned an eye when he pocketed the cash instead of throwing it in the register. Decker was long gone now, but they were old enough anyway. Too old, really.
The group had somehow split in two—guys huddled around one square wood-look table, girls at another. They often tended to revert to those old formations. Lorraine wasn’t interested tonight, couldn’t bring herself to care—it was clear she was hitting some lower than low point with this addiction of hers. She had no idea what the girls were talking about, just heard snippets.
“I just saw him look at you,” Susan had said to her best friend Mary. Lorraine didn’t have to guess who they meant. Mary’s had a thing for Petey for the last couple of years. Even if Lorraine hadn’t known, she wouldn’t have cared to ask. Their gossip never interested her. She had enough problems with gossip, she didn’t need to add to the worldwide epidemic. Like recycling, she thought, if she could just do her part...
“I’m not sure,” Chrissy said, her eyes narrowed to little slits—Lorraine knew without looking. That was how she always delivered her commentary, like every word should be handled with the utmost gravity. The seriousness she conveyed bore no reflection on the effort Chrissy exuded to actually change things—none—and to work on what she looked so disturbed by.
“Haven’t you had enough of this?” Chrissy asked Lorraine, despite the fact it was her idea to come. It was obvious it hadn’t been a good idea. But Lorraine knew she would have gone no matter what. Besides, Chrissy had the same problem she did. You had to want to change something to put the effort in. And neither of them were there yet—although Lorraine could feel herself getting close.
Lorraine knew that it was frustration of the sexual sort that made Chrissy want to get the hell out of dodge. (That had been their saying the whole summer. Lorraine couldn’t remember where they’d heard it. But it was permanent, now that the nights were getting a slight chill. It was staying, just like everything else in her life did, without changing, losing significance along the way.) Chrissy was so worked up, she was peeling labels off of every bottle on the table. Her boyfriend hadn’t slept with her in two months, and she was pissed. That’s why she wanted to come to Bay Ridge Bowl in the first place—she wanted some attention. She thought she’d dressed for it, but Chrissy was a good Christian girl and his idea of dressing tartish was to wear a boatneck and matching earrings. It didn’t matter, though. Nobody was gonna screw with her because her boyfriend was connected, and no girl was worth that.
Now she was regular frustrated on top of the sexual frustration. Which, if you think about it, is a lot of frustration.
“The Diner.”
They both needed it. Lorraine knew Tommy was gonna take that girl back to wherever it was she lived, to show himself he could have that life if he wanted it. She knew just how he’d kiss that girl and where he’d put his hands and for how long. She’d seen enough.
Bay Ridge Diner was another place so familiar to Lorraine that she could tell you with her eyes closed how many booths were torn and which ones stunk like puke—from her own friends who’d drunk too much late at night. She knew where the beveled mirrors were cracked, where the tacky chandelier light fixtures didn’t work anymore, and that the waitresses dumped the coleslaw you didn’t eat back inside the plastic bucket and re-served it.
“Large fries and two Cokes.” Lorraine didn’t need to ask Chrissy what she wanted. They’d been eating this for nearly fifteen years. It was a wonder they stayed so thin.
They weren’t gonna talk about Chrissy’s problems with Big Bobby. There was nothing to talk about. He was cheating on her, but she wouldn’t do anything about it except project her frustration onto Lorraine’s own hopeless situation.
Lorraine could count the seconds from the time the waitress brought their Cokes in those old pebbled brown plastic glasses to the moment she knew Chrissy would start in.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
“Seriously, Lorraine, what the fuck is wrong with you?” She readjusted her boatneck, which Lorraine knew was a half-hearted commentary on her own low-cut top.
It was as pointless to explain to Chrissy that the deep-cut blouson-style chiffon top wasn’t slutty, but stylish, as it was to explain that Tommy would call later. He would call to make Lorraine see there was hope despite what she might have seen earlier, and still saw now; he would call to tell her that she was someone too special for him to screw around with like he did with that other girl, and that he had to be ready for her. She’d gone through all of this before, and Chrissy never bought it.
So she took a long sip of her soda instead, watching it zip up through the straw, and then she stopped sucking and watched it slip back down into the cup.
Back in her bed, in a warm sweatshirt washed down to a soft finish, with a big neckline cut so it hung off her shoulder, and tight pants, sliced open to flare at the ankle the way the girls were doing when Lorraine was in high school, she thought how cozy and reliable her bedroom was. She just loved it in there. The door was heavy enough so she could barely hear her mother screaming at her father, and her father ignoring it and making smooching noises all the while (“Look at this plate we have to use—chipped!” “Oh, give Poppa a big hug!”); it was far enough upstairs so her brother and his stupid high school friends (she had nothing against them, but had taken to calling them “stupid” so long ago she had to stick with it now) could be in a different country for all she knew, rather than just down in the basement.
Her hair did look cute like that, she thought, after she’d pulled the sweatshirt over her head and saw her waves pop out in her bureau mirror. There wasn’t too much room in that mirror for looking at herself, what with old pictures of her and Chrissy and Tommy and other people from the group—some of which she’d been closer with at some point or another, some of which she could care less about, but still hung around with out of habit.
It was silly to be getting herself fixed up—some more deodorant, a little Bath & Body Works Watermelon Spray, turning her head over, shaking out those waves. But she knew he would be calling soon. She lay in her bed and thought about the day a bit while she waited.
She worked at the Do Wop Shop for Hair, where she was a senior colorist. She loved coloring hair. When she looked at a head of hair, Lorraine could see exactly which shade should be painted there—it seemed obvious to her. Do Wop Shop for Hair, wouldn’t let her apply color in the way she wanted.
“One head! One color!” he screamed it so many times, sounding like an old Benetton ad. Only it was the opposite of the open-mindedness Benetton had in mind. One color means flat color. It’s cheap and extremely archaic, just like the salon itself. Why didn’t they just use coffee grinds like friggin’ Cleopatra did? Mrs. Jacobson, would you move over to the Columbian Dark Roast vat so we can do your roots? It shouldn’t have angered her after so many years, but it did.
You’re the most freakin’ stubborn man in all of Brooklyn!” She screamed along with mumbled profanities under her breath, and exaggerated plenty of kicks at the papers and things that were always scattered over the floor in salons. But he barely listened, barely heard her anymore. He was her uncle and so he was never going to fire her, or Lorraine’s mother would kill him.
An hour and a half later, Lorraine’s telephone rang. She had her own “teen line” (What a joke, you’re almost thirty! Her brother said when he was that on the bill. He was a real comedian, her brother). Her parents had installed it when she was in junior high. When Lorraine’s phone rang, as it very often did, in the middle of the night, it never woke anyone.
“Hello?” she acted surprised, like she had no idea who it was. Like all sorts of men called her in the middle of the night.
“Hey.” He sucked in a deep breath after he saw it.
Lorraine took this as a signal of comfort. Finally, he could be himself. When he could be himself, she could see a glimpse of that Lorraine she was always looking to recover. Thoughts like that could soothe you while you watched a leopard-printed ho bag stick her skanky tongue down Tommy’s throat. But she wouldn’t mention that now. The way their conversations had evolved over the years, there was no other girl in the world aside from Lorraine, despite the reality.
“Went to the diner?” Tommy asked her.
“Yeah.” He always wanted to know where she’d disappeared to. She knew that had to mean something.
“Cool. I was there just now. You know, that waitress, Sandy, is quitting? She saved up enough to move to Florida.”
“Nah, I didn’t know that,” Lorraine said, trying not to wonder how Tommy came to know this, trying not to picture Sandy—Lorraine thought she might have been the coarse redhead with the real curvy body—telling him about that, sharing a cigarette, undressing somewhere.
“What was up with that hair tonight, Lorraine? You looked like you wanted something. Something hot.”
Lorraine couldn’t help it; a smile hijacked her face. She knew she was grabbing for crumbs, but when crumbs were all you got, you found ways to make them into a satisfying meal.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Tommy. None whatsoever.” She pulled her stuffed lion from the Bronx Zoo a little tighter. Tommy had bought it for her. She’d some out of the bathroom by the polar bears and there it was, in his hands. And he’d kissed her, smoothed her hair back, like all of her dreams were coming true. Whenever Tommy was in her room and looked at that lion, there was satisfaction on his face—he knew a piece of him would always be there. “You’re the real thing Lorraine, the real thing,” he’d whispered while they were still both holding on to it.”
“I think you do,” he said, and what hung between them doubled and tripled in meaning in the minute of silence that followed.
Tommy switched CDs to some old house music that functioned as a time machine for Lorraine, careening her back to age sixteen, dancing in a street like she had the whole world in her hand. She imagined she could hear the clicking and clacking not only through the phone, but through the window. It increased their connection when she could picture that, concentrate on it. One, two, three songs they listened to that way, not saying a thing, until Tommy spoke.
“Remember that?” he asked.
And she did. They’d driven upstate one Memorial Day weekend, all twenty of them, to someone’s sister’s house—a real dump, with peeling paint, scratchy upholstery, and basement mold. That music played the whole time, while they punched a volleyball around the pool, drank way, way too much during games of flip cup, roasted marshmallows and barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers, which they ate with coleslaw and giant sour pickles fished from a barrel. It was one of the times they were on again. She could remember his arm over her back, rubbing up and down, the feel of her T-shirt tickling under his palm.
“What happened to all that hope, Lorraine? Where is it in this world? What am I doing here? What’s my...purpose?” He seemed to consider the question, as if it were just then uniquely conjured in his mind, like people didn’t think that very same thing with every other breath. Lately, he’d been doing this more. He’d get far-off and moody, drifting where Lorraine couldn’t reach him. She was doing a crazy dance trying to.
She could see him staring up at his ceiling, those old glow-in-the-dark stars and planets still stuck up there. There wasn’t a person in the world he spoke to like this. That Lorraine knew for a fact. You’re the real thing, Lorraine. The real thing.”
She felt the tears burn, but tried to swallow the sound. She knew it was true. So why could they not just share their lives? Soon, soon, she hoped she could stop asking herself that, and just accept things the way they were.
After more silence and more songs, during which Lorraine’s tears had multiplied and finally stopped, Tommy started to tell her more, the way he had very recently started to do. And when he revealed too much, he covered his tracks by shoving the conversation over to more meaningless topics, like the new cheese he thought they should introduce at Bay Pizza, how Tommy wanted to start Pepperoni Fridays with two pies and pepperoni stromboli and a two liter of Dr. Pepper (“Get it?” he said. “Pepper? Pepperoni?”) for twenty bucks, and tell that son of a bitch he worked for that you need to change and stock things like chocolate ice cream pizzas for dessert, or else you die.
She didn’t ask him why—if change was so damned important—did he still live in the same town, do the same things, play the same games with her, bring her so close to everything she wanted and just pull it away until she was spinning around like the dough hook they used on the electric mixer at the pizzeria? More and more she was feeling anger poke through her desperation. It surprised her, and she just held her breath until she had to let it go for a refill.
“I just wanna go someplace, do something real. Don’t you wanna go somewhere, Lorraine? Or do you wanna die at the goddamned Do Wop?”
“God! She thought with sadness how he was patronizing her when she’d given up all her chances to do something better for a chance to be with him. She squeezed the belly of that lion, until she’d pierced his fur and her fingernails were scraping against each other. He was so hostile tonight!
“Where the fuck are you going, Lorraine? Where?”
He pushed it so far, she couldn’t stop the tears rolling now, and the embarrassing moan that accompanied them. Her hair quickly sopped them up, her pillow, too. Would this be her whole life? Or was this it—the point where things would come to a horrifying halt, finally, once and for all, sealing the fate that she would never get back to that place with him? Which would be worse?
She knew Tommy was projecting his own self-disappointment onto her. But when you’re in love, you can't see things even when you can guess at them in some remote part of yourself. You only see yourself through that person’s eyes, and you want to be everything they want you to be so they can love you, and so you can breathe. When you can’t see anything in their eyes, you are nothing. And so she didn’t answer, only dug the hole in the lion deeper and deeper, staring so hard at one spot on her wall that her eyes ached.
Finally, she whispered in as steady a tone as she could manage, which wasn’t all that steady, “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand. Jeez, Lorraine. I hate to be the one to tell you this. But Lorraine, you’re a round-the-way girl—plain and simple. And that’s what you’ll always be. And that is why you and I will never work, Lorraine. Because I’m going somewhere. I’m sorry, Lorraine, but I gotta go.”
Lorraine and Tommy. Their names were knotted up for better or worse like old necklaces at the bottom of a jewelry box. You could knead them between your fingers, try whatever means you could to yank them free of each other, but still, there they were—through all his phrases—joined up and not letting go. Whenever anyone ran into Lorraine, they’d think right away of Tommy. “Meet someone else already!” they’d say to save her. “Have you met my nephew Bartholomew (or Christopher or Bryan with a Y)?”
Or they’d be hopeful. She loved the hopeful ones. They’d ask “so when is he going to pop the question already?” as they spread mayonnaise on her turkey sandwich or rang up her Snapple iced tea. Everyone had an opinion about them—whether they approved or disapproved—but always that opinion encircled them both, drew them together, created an inevitable union that no one could deny. Never in all the days she waited, anticipated, through she might just starve to death for even the scent of his deodorant, a glimpse of his ankle under the white cotton of a sock, did she ever think that in the end, they would wind up apart.
But that night, a giant meteor came hurling through her twisty telephone cord and crushed her right where she sat. It might not happen between us. It might not happen between us. Before she knew what had happened, she’d torn into the hole in her lion, pulling a tiny string of stuffing out. It was the cheap kind that mixed itchy crimped grays and browns in with the more choice white fluff. And soon she was clawing it out—clumps at a time—digging her inch-and-a-half acrylic nails deep inside until there was absolutely nothing left inside him. The stuffing littered her bed and the floor surrounding it, but the lion was completely deflated, with a telling hole in his underbelly. She knew just how he felt.
Lorraine took the lion over to the window with her; together, they looked beyond the five (un)twisty shrubs and caught a sliver of that tree where everything had started with Tommy, where they had really become knotted up, pulled tight and marred for the very first time. Her chest was heaving as if all of her insides were being ripped out as well. She had the sudden fear that everything that filled her had also been of the cheap variety, the kind that couldn’t, wouldn’t last. She tried not to make a noise, and when she thought she might, she mashed the deflated lion over her mouth to muffle the sound. Admitting it to herself was one thing. Sharing it would be something else entirely.
Lorraine and the lion shell could see that the tree was not what it once was. Those boughs, which had been lush with greenery—Ah! The sound of those raindrops!—were mostly dried out and cracked under their own weight. Looking out the window, it became obvious to Lorraine that something had changed...forever.
____________________________________
May 4, 1994
Dear NYU Admissions Officers,
While I am grateful for the generous scholarship offered to me, I regret to inform that I will have to decline your offer of admission to NYU.
Sincerely Yours,
Lorraine Machuchi
____________________________________
eBay auction block #2
Description: In this letter, Lorraine Machuchi empathetically decided to skip college at NYU so she could stay in Brooklyn with Tommy, whose feelings she wanted to spare from the despair of realizing he’d not gotten in when Lorraine had.
Opening bid: $325
Winning bid: $875 by tommyl@aol.com
Comments: See! I knew it! She loves me! So take THAT Mr. Mercedes!!!!!!! Sucka!