“Language, El. Language.” Malcolm slides his eyes in my direction.
“Don’t lecture me.” I’m hot now, hotter than I’ve been in a while, but I pause, take a few of those deep yoga breaths, and cool myself down before speaking. “There’s no way Judy failed her test last month. No way.”
“Wait a sec,” Anne says. “Judy failed? That’s impossible. Judy’s a fucking rock star. Oh. Sorry, Mom. Freaking rock star.” There’s no tutting or reprobation from her father. “Anyway, no way Judy bombed.” She leaves the room, iPhone in hand, fingers working madly at the keys.
When we’re alone again, I glare at my husband. “Like I said.”
So what does Malcolm do? He shrugs. That’s it. Shoulders up, shoulders down. And he pinches another piece of eggplant with his chopsticks.
I used to love the man sitting across from me. I loved his wit and his smarts and his I’ll always take care of you attitude, and I looked up to him. I traded something for this man, something I thought I wanted, and still do.
In hindsight, it was a shitty trade.
ELEVEN
THEN:
I was in my studio apartment at Yale on the last Saturday of September, finished with classes and ready for the weekend. New England had started turning pretty with its annual leaf-mosaic show, and I’d planned on taking the car out of shitty New Haven and driving farther north for the weekend. I had not been planning to wake up and lurch to the tiny subway-tiled bathroom.
An hour later, after a quick trip to the Rite Aid down the street, I was still in that bathroom, sitting on the icy porcelain of the toilet, shaking the pee stick, as if by shaking it I could knock one of those blue lines out of the little window and turn a plus into a minus, change a baby into a nothing.
I’d split up with Malcolm in early summer, partly because my mother persuaded me that a break might be a good thing, partly because I didn’t want my first boyfriend to be my only-and-forever boyfriend. And partly because of Joe.
We grew up together, played kickball in the street and made mud pies in a ditch behind my parents’ house. Joe was normal, except for a fanaticism about anything with an internal combustion engine. When we got our licenses, he fixed up an old Mustang, a wreck of a thing he rescued from Mr. Cooper’s junkyard. When he turned seventeen, Joe had the hottest car in town. He also had the lowest grade point average in our high school, and SAT scores a hedgehog could have beaten.
He wasn’t exactly Joe College, but he was a good guy, taking me to movies he swore weren’t dates, buying me gallon-sized tubs of fake-buttered popcorn while some teen-scream villain with razors for fingernails flashed in the on-screen shadows. At sixteen, I was more interested in museums than movies, but I still let Joe talk me into a Friday-night replay of a decades-old film that he once again swore was Not. A. Date. Until he tried to turn it into one. He shivered once next to me when Freddy Krueger danced murderously into the dreams of unsuspecting Elm Street teenagers, and I realized Joe didn’t like the flick, either. But I knew then why he had picked it.
So we sat, shrinking back in our seats, tucked against each other, giggling at the absurd bits and gasping at the cheesy horror.
I told Malcolm about the movie the next day, deliberately leaving out the awkward almost-romance. He rolled his eyes and asked why I was wasting my time with that type, with someone who could never amount to anything more than a subpar grease monkey, with someone who would only make me miserable. He drove the point home by always stopping for gas at the station where Joe worked, and the subject never came up again. I saw the black grease under Joe’s fingernails, the tattooed dragon coiling around his biceps, the future of him undefined and not very desirable.
Joe still called, sent emails, caught up when I came down from Connecticut on school breaks. He got me through a bad patch of depression, spent hours on the phone with me