We moved into the house on November 19, a date Mom’s horoscope reported was a good day for a move. It was also a date that used to be my parents’ anniversary. If Mom thought about the irony of it, if she noticed it at all, she didn’t mention it to me.
As Mom had gone around the apartment taking watercolors off the walls, I learned they were hers. Hers, as in, she chose them, she paid for them, she got to keep them. It was surprising to me, I’d never thought of anything we had as other than “ours.” The day was full of little revelations like that, and it left me feeling washed out.
At eight p.m. we ate tuna salad sandwiches, the three of us perched on boxes in the kitchen so Mom could admire the harvest-gold appliances. Personally, I couldn’t get into the same light mood, but I got it that she was excited to be in the house.
Me, I missed Dad. More than when I was in Queens and he was only a short subway ride away. I wondered who would sympathize if I pinched my finger in a car door.
Mom exhausted the subject of the kitchen pretty quickly. She went on to say she’d change to her long-awaited part-time schedule this coming week so she could get us settled in. I could see she was also eager to settle into her part-time stay-at-home schedule. After the last few months of extra-long hours, I couldn’t hold it against her.
Mr. B talked at length about a kid who had also moved here within the last couple of weeks, coming from a really good high school football team in Buffalo. He considered the kid to be some find.
When Mom admitted she was dating Mr. B, I could not understand how she could have outgrown Dad and then gravitated toward my gym teacher. After all, I’d figured Mr. B for one of those sports-brained guys who had season tickets to the games. But I knew him better now. He was a nice guy. Probably he pictured his football player and me being odd men out together until we found other friends.
“I think we ought to turn in early,” Mr. B said. “Leave this unpacking for tomorrow. The boy’s tired.”
Somewhere along the line, I had become “the boy.” At first this seemed to differentiate me from Mr. B’s other students, but lately it was said with a degree of affection that I couldn’t ignore. Mr. B was letting me and my mother know he saw us as a family. And yet he wasn’t stepping on Dad’s toes. This needed a delicate balance, and I was less and less surprised to find he knew it.
So far as school was concerned, I wasn’t expecting much of a welcoming committee myself. I doubted many teachers were looking over my grades from last year and thinking I was a find. As for making friends, cliques would have formed. Maybe Mr. B was right. The football player and I might find we had something in common.
We might have to.
I went upstairs to my room and shoved a couple of boxes out of my way. I stood for a minute in the dark. The windows were still bare, and plenty of light came in from the street. Enough light anyway to sit down on my desk chair near the window and try to feel like I belonged there.
A telephone sat on my bedside table, one of the perks that came with my new position, stepson of Mr. B. It had an element of strangeness, like the plastic-wrapped sofa that stretched across the living room.
Otherwise, the furniture came from my room in the apartment I grew up in. It looked familiar, and yet changed here. Everything seemed to take up more space. As for me, I needed more space. I could feel an acne attack looming when a light came on in a room in the house next door. The light spilled onto the double-width driveway.
My brain cataloged this fact while at the same time I watched a girl strip a sweater off over her head and throw it aside. She took up a position in front of a mirror and pulled her blond hair back into a ponytail, giving me a clear view of her in her bra.
I knew she was moving in real time, but I took everything in as if it was in slow motion. She appeared to be in a ballet of lifted arms and tossed sweater, her hair swung with a faint rebound, like the punctuation at the end of a sentence, the light reflecting off her skin so that she was almost outlined in a halo.
She might have been a painting done by an Old Master or, at the very least, starring in a shampoo commercial. This girl seared a forever-in-memory film short onto the movie screen of my blissed-out mind.
A woman, I was guessing her mother, came to her bedroom door and said something to her. It seemed, from the curt gestures of the mother, the toss of the ponytailed head, they were arguing. The girl swung open a closet door, grabbed a shirt off a hanger, and pulled it on, all while they continued a lively discussion.
They both left the room abruptly, leaving the light on. I went on sitting in the dark, thinking this girl next door was an excellent development. I wondered what her name was.
I heard footsteps on the stairs. Mom’s quick steps.
“Vinnie, what are you doing, sitting here in the dark?”
“Deciding that I like my new room.”
This wasn’t an answer she expected. “I’m very happy to hear it.” She flipped on the light, making me glad the room across the driveway was empty. “Unpack whatever you’re going to need for tomorrow. I’ll make up your bed.”
“I’ll make my bed.” I flicked the light switch off. “ ’Night, Mom.”