ZAIDIE
FOR THE THIRD TIME IN MY NEARLY EIGHTEEN YEARS, LIFE SPLIT into a jagged Before and After. Before Jimmy’s arrest, I’d been focused on graduation and preparing to leave for college. If I worried, it was about being separated from Charlie, who was going to school in Maine.
By then, we’d been together for two years and three months—practically a senior class record. On weekends, we parked his Mustang in Barkley’s Woods for hours, daring each other, daring ourselves to go a little further as the year wound down. For the rest of the week the spark of everything we weren’t supposed to do followed me, taking my breath at odd times, pulling me back to that dark car, the smell of leather seats, sandalwood cologne, and night.
Once in calculus—calculus!—I looked over at Charlie and thought of the last time we’d been together. His finger grazing my nipple. I flushed so bad that even Mr. Weintraub took notice.
He stopped the class. “Are you all right, Zaida?”
“Um, I feel like, uh . . . I think I’m coming down with something,” I stammered, the eyes of the class on me. “Can I see the nurse?”
The whole thing was turning me into a blathering idiot. Headed for Mrs. Bonner’s office, I could feel the heat on my face. She poked a thermometer in my mouth and looked at me skeptically: No fever.
She should only know.
THAT NIGHT ON the phone, Charlie talked to me in the low voice he sometimes used in the Mustang and I told him about the abandoned shack where older kids like my brother used to take their girlfriends, my untraceable fever rising. A storm had toppled a dead tree in the path and littered it with brush, but I was sure we could get there.
He got quiet for a moment. “When?” His voice curled around me like smoke. There was nothing wrong with it, I told myself. Charlie and I loved each other.
And after two years and all those nights in Barkley’s Woods, the moments when I was stopped by the memory of his mouth, his secret fierceness, there couldn’t be anything wrong with it. Well, could there?
Jimmy would have known the answer, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed with your brother. Especially not a protective one like mine. And when I tried to tell Agnes, she just wrinkled up her nose and told me to talk to someone else; she wasn’t interested. She made it sound worse than Nonna or my friend Cynthia, who talked about Sin. Confession. Penance.
Not knowing where else to turn, I went out one night and sat in the alley outside Rusty’s Hideaway, where Jane waited tables. If anyone would understand, she would. Fair enough was the motto she’d adopted after her own bitter experience. Pronounced in her edgy way, eyes flashing left and right as if on the lookout for who-knew-what, it almost sounded like a threat.
Everything about her seemed different now—from her appearance to her speech patterns. These days she sounded more like a lifer at the factory than a judge’s daughter, or stepdaughter, as she always emphasized. Agnes and I suspected it was her way of getting back at her parents. Maybe Jimmy had been that for her, too—at least in the beginning. Fair enough.
“What are you doing here?” she said when she came out for her break. “I got fifteen minutes to eat supper and pull body and soul together for the rest of my shift. If you got somethin’ to say to me, this ain’t the time.”
“But it’s . . . it’s important, and I can’t talk about it at the house.”
She lit a cigarette and looked at me, annoyed, but maybe a little curious, too.
Undeterred, I blurted out everything—from how I felt that day in calculus to the plan to go to the shack. The whole ugly confusing knot of it.
Jane sat there on an old milk can, hunched over her cigarette. The only signs she was paying attention were the way her eyes shifted back and forth when I spoke and the restless tapping of her foot, which sped up when I got to something significant.
After her smoke, she wolfed down a cheese sandwich oozing French’s mustard while I shifted uncomfortably on my seat, wondering why I’d come. I didn’t even like Jane.
She consulted her watch. “I got three minutes before I’m due back on the floor.” I was about to leave when she wiped her mouth with her apron and told me to wait; she had something for me. Her cigarette was still burning. She returned with a small square packet. Instead of taking it, I shot her a puzzled look.
“You don’t even know a friggin’ rubber when you see one, do you?” she said. “Obviously, you need it more than I thought.”
“But I—” Feeling my color rising, I held it between two fingers, as if mere contact with the thing was dangerous. “I mean—we’re not going to do that . . .”
“Humor me, will ya? Put it in your pocketbook.” She took a couple more sweet puffs from her cigarette, mashed it out, and started inside.
I wanted to leave her disgusting Trojan right there. Sure, I might have gone a little too far with Charlie, I might even have liked it, but I wasn’t the type to need one of those. But for some reason, I dropped it back into my pocketbook. If nothing else, it would be fun to shock Cynthia.
“SO WHY ARE you still holding on to it?” Cynthia asked when I told her the story about Jane. We were sitting in her bedroom, surrounded by the same lilac wallpaper that had been on the wall since we were six. She reached for the tissue box she kept on her bureau. “Wrap it up and throw it away,” she ordered. “Now.”
Though it was what I intended to do, I wasn’t about to take orders from her. I closed my fist on the packet.
“Are you crazy? Someone might see it. Your ma, for instance, and—”
“And what?”
“Remember what Mr. Ryan said in English composition? If you introduce a gun in the beginning of the story, you’ll use it by the end. It’s a rule.”
“Chekhov said that, not Mr. Ryan. Besides, this isn’t a story, and that’s not a gun.” I dropped the packet back into my pocketbook. With the way things were progressing in Barkley’s Woods, though, and with Charlie pressuring me about the shack, I wasn’t so sure.
I had other things on my mind, though. That day, I was picking up my perfect prom dress. Unlike the flowing pastels everyone else was wearing, this one was a sleek deep purple. Agnes said it was almost the color of my eyes when I was excited about something. But the real reason I loved it was because it reminded me of the sky that entered our room when we had our best talks.
AS IT TURNED out, though, the dress would sit in the closet, draped in its plastic bag, unworn on prom night. I blamed Mr. Dean for my breakup with Charlie, my spoiled graduation—and for just about everything else that had gone wrong in our family. It wasn’t only the horrible things he’d done to Agnes when she was little or the sly torment she endured for years; I didn’t just hate him for trailing her home from practice (why, why?) or for walking toward that glowing phone booth on the night Jimmy’s life was ruined. The damage, the threat had rippled through all of us from the first day Agnes stood in the picture window, watching for his car. As I’d learned in Saturday school, one small act of goodness spreads outward, leading to untold benefits, as did the opposite.
“What’s any of this got to do with me—with us?” Charlie said the day I told him. “I’m sorry about your brother and everything, but do you have to wreck our senior year—wreck us? How’s that supposed to help?”
I looked at him sorrowfully. How could I explain that senior year just didn’t matter anymore? Or that after Jimmy was arrested, I was no longer sure I even wanted to go to college, much less the dumb senior parties. One day I’d decide to take a year off and stay home where I could visit Jimmy on Saturdays, maybe even see if Jane could get me a job at the Hideaway. The next I wanted to bolt as soon as I could. Leave for California and never come back.
“I wanted to tell you now so you’d have time to get another date,” I said. “I’m sure there’s lots of girls who would go—”
“Gee, thanks, Zaidie. That’s big of you.” He walked away shaking his head while I felt the tears rising up inside me.
THE ONLY ONE who understood was Agnes. Everywhere one of us went, someone seemed to be whispering behind their hands. Her brother, her brother . . . Or worse, something about the Moscatelli kids. As if we were all guilty.
Though Agnes had gone back to swimming—harder and faster than before, she claimed with bitter satisfaction—and I remained diligent in my studies, we spent our free time huddled in the house, sitting in the hole as if Princie were still alive and Jon and Jimmy crowded us on the couch. In some ways, though, I felt stronger than ever.
FINALLY, ONE NIGHT, just before six, I was driven out of the house where nothing was cooking on the stove, Ma moped over a puzzle she would never finish, and Dad refused to walk through the door when he was supposed to. That night even Agnes was out—probably with Henry. Though she hadn’t talked about him since I broke up with Charlie, I’d heard Caroline was going to the prom with someone from another school.
I walked faster, propelled by the confusion that swirled inside me day and night.
Just two days earlier, I’d convinced Jane to come with me to visit Jimmy. He barely spoke until we were ready to leave. Then he told us not to bother coming again.
“The hell, Jimmy,” Jane said, wavy lines appearing on her twenty-two-year-old forehead.
“You heard me. I don’t want no visitors.”
But it didn’t take long before he read our crestfallen expressions and the sweetest of the sweet resurfaced. “Don’t ya understand?” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s not that I don’t want to see yas. It’s just . . . the two of you? You don’t belong in a place like this.”
I tried to tell him that he didn’t, either, but he stopped me. “Everything they said I done, I done, Z. And in my head—more.”
Jane, however, wiped her eyes. “Fair enough.” The words seemed to mock all three of us.
So all of that was inside me the night I left the house—Jane’s tears—“Not angry tears, pissed-the-hell-off tears,” she called them, as if that was a whole different category of anger—and the defeat that rose off Jimmy’s skin. I had totally forgotten it was the night of the prom.
I swear I didn’t plan to end up outside Charlie’s house, but all of a sudden, it felt as if there was nowhere else to go. I tossed a rock at his second-floor window the way I used to. He lifted the shade, and then a few minutes later, appeared in the front door.
As soon as he came out, heck, probably before I left the house, I was crying. What could he do but wrap me up in his arms, his pale hair grazing my cheek, the smell of his skin—musk and grass—pulling me back to before faster than the speed of light?
“I wish I knew what to say, Zaidie,” he whispered. “I wish . . . I could make it go away.”
And when that made me cry harder, what could he do but kiss me? It was a light, consoling kiss at first. But when I kissed him in return, it quickly became the locus of all my confusion and hunger, a kiss that had forgotten nothing. I don’t know who suggested we take a walk, but I was the one who led us to the shack in the woods.
Sometimes I tell myself I didn’t plan for it to happen or want it to happen; it just did. By then, we both knew that what we had was over. That whether I went away to college or not, he would soon be gone. But more than that—I wasn’t the Zaidie he’d fallen for, the one who was still open-hearted enough to love him back.
But then I’m forced to remember the deliberateness with which we moved those trees out of the path, dragged away the brush, wrenched open the door. I’m forced to see him, taking off his jacket, then his shirt; how I touched the muscles of his chest before he laid his clothes across the plank bed where Richard J. Cartier had slept.
If anyone hesitated, it was Charlie. “Are you sure?” he said, taking my face in his hands. Though the light was dim, the mixture of fire and gentleness that had made me love him was in his eyes. “We don’t have to, you know—”
But it seemed we did. I reached into my pocketbook for the foil packet I’d carried around for months. Somewhere, Chekhov was laughing.