my back with her finger and I had to guess what she’d just written. It felt so yummy to have my back tickled that I would slide into a stupor every time.
“I don’t know,” I’d say, “write it again. Write me a book.”
Made me want to bawl thinking of it there in Jill’s bedroom, Marlene’s fingernails grazing my skin.
“I’m going out,” I told Ruby.
Jill glanced at her mother. “Do you want company?”
“I’m not going home, okay, I just want to go for a walk.”
Ruby’s tone went low and careful. “I don’t know what all’s happened to you, Sammie, but I just want you to know that we love you.”
Jesus Christ! Love, love love.
Anyone who says I love you is just trying to hold you hostage. Drew should knock it the hell off, too, I thought. He should take it back.
And just like that, the phone rang again. Ruby, Jill and I looked at the bedside table. Ruby picked up, said hello and listened.
“Just a moment.” She held the receiver out for me.
“Sammie?” Drew’s voice was strained and huffing, as if he’d been running. He must have been at a phone booth. I could hear the traffic. “I’m sorry. I meant like a friend. You’re my best friend. Like that, okay? I love you like that.”
“I have to go,” I said, and hung up the phone.
Rainwater drips off the ends of my hair. People passing by with umbrellas look at me as if I’m a complete berserker, out in a downpour like this.
Is it turkeys that tilt their heads back in the rain and drown?
I keep hearing Drew. I love you. Marlene too. I love you. Makes me want to dig out my skull with a spoon.
Marlene claims to be selective about the love stuff. She doesn’t say that to just anyone, she says. Mind you, she also says, “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” whenever she’s trying to get something out of me. She hates all that God stuff and then she comes out with crazy shit like that.
I love you, Marlene says, and then she buggers off and doesn’t even leave a note. It was just her and me. Me and her. She used to understand that. She used to always leave notes.
One time, I heard her out back at two in the morning with some jerk. My mother has the worst taste in men.
“Come on, Jack, just for a minute,” she kept saying. Her s’s were sliding all over the place. The guy’s voice was too low to make out. Marlene got louder. “Look at me, Jack, please?” Right outside my bedroom window.
Made me sick to hear her beg like that. I pulled the pillow over my head.
Suddenly, clippy footsteps came down the little cement path beside our balcony. And then I heard the Romanian accent of Nadia, the caretaker’s wife.
“Marlene!” she said in a loud whisper. “You are waking up half the building.”
I wondered why it was Nadia and not her husband, George, coming out in the middle of the night. Seems like Nadia always had to do the dirty work.
“This is my goddamn place,” my mother said to Nadia, “and I’ll do whatever the hell I like.”
I peered through the crack between the curtains. I saw parts of Nadia—short, choppy hair, pyjama pants, and her elbow jumping around in a woolly sweater as she jabbed a finger toward Marlene.
“Get inside your goddamn place,” Nadia hissed, “or I will call the police!”
Then the jerk spoke up. “Let’s calm down.”
“Don’t tell me what to do!” That was Marlene, of course.
I listened until our apartment door opened and closed. There was scuffling and bumping, my mother saying, Oops, and giggling.
I tried to let my brain fade into sleep. After a while, my mom’s voice came high and needy again, like a baby, like a Siamese cat.
“I love you, Jack. I love you.”
That was the capper.
“I never even said I love you to your father,” Marlene had once told me. “Only you. The second you were born I loved you.”
I’d never even heard of Jack.
I opened my bedroom door and stood there, looking into the living room, where my mother was on the couch pawing the guy’s face. Jack was all leathery brown and skinny like a science project. I swear to God, he was like one of those bog-men who gets preserved in peat for a hundred years.
“Mom!”
She jerked around. “Sammie.” Her voice went all honey-pie. “Come here.” She patted the bit of empty couch beside her. “Jack,