the blue-blood field hockey star from
Choate
(her italics). Their relationship had taken on easy contours from the start. In a nice private-school way, she and Mel were well aligned and stayed so for years.
Whenever she felt bored, she’d ask Mel to take her down to visit his family in Providence. There, she would sit down at one of those Italian feasts they show in those movies, with gigantic
happy
women(her words) who wore gold jewelry and drove American cars and men who smelled like trashy women. It was Mel’s family, more than Mel himself, that kept Performance Fleece around. She had always shown an interest in other cultures. (I snickered at this, but after she stabbed me in the back of the hand with a cocktail straw, I shut up.)
No
, not lame, like
that
. Not like those girls who travel abroad to
Tibet
or some fucked-up place and take 16-mm photos of poor children playing
soccer
, but more like I was interested in
fucking
a lot of different types of guys, like in middle school, I gave one of the METCO kids a blowjob after he got done with football practice. At Choate, I stole out of my dorm and let two of the Mexican guys who worked in the dining hall fondle and suck on my breasts, for like an hour, and rub me. Over the pants. (Again, her words. Note: longest sentence I had heard out of her. Plus, she giggled.)
She did not know why she stayed with Mel for all those years. Maybe the stability of the logic behind their union helped her with the guilt she felt over her true inner slut. Or maybe she did love his family enough to lease out their son. Maybe Boston just didn’t make sense to her without Mel. They had the same friends, they ate at the same five restaurants, they drank at the same two bars, they shopped at the same supermarket, and both took the T to Downtown Crossing. Love and cities are always inextricably entwined. There’s no restaurant or corner store or run-down dive in any city that doesn’t double as a monument for a lost love. I think that’s why we always stop and stare whenever we come across a girl crying in public. We sense the imprint of a memory being pressed onto the sidewalk, onto the building contours, onto the names of the streets.
Boston, Performance Fleece explained, had become just a photo reelof her years with Mel. In the first frame, she and Mel move her mom’s old furniture into the bottom floor of a run-down duplex in Cambridgeport. Farther along the reel, after having lived all over Boston, they stand smiling next to a SOLD sign. She had just accepted the progression of these images, just as she had accepted Choate, lacrosse camp, Williams, and, ultimately, Mel. Then, one day, for reasons unknown, she simply didn’t. Everything became ugly to her—the hats the cashiers at Dunkin’ Donuts had to wear, the grease on the handgrips on the T, the excess butter served with the bread at Bertucci’s, the endless talk about the Red Sox, the droves of pale, mute Chinese kids, forever shuttling on the Red Line between Kendall/MIT and Harvard Square, the green everywhere on Saint Patrick’s Day and the kids who never took an interest in anything other than Tom Brady suddenly asking one another what part of Ireland their people were from, the constant questions from their married friends about when they were going to “repay the party,” the drabness of the drive on the 2 up to her parents’ house in Beverly, the only stretch of road in America where the trees are bare year-round, the bartender at their neighborhood bar, a guy Mel described as “the salt of the earth,” and his stupid philosophy about what constituted “honest work,” mostly stolen from
Good Will Hunting
.
When they left Boston for San Francisco, the scaffolding of their love fell away. She had known this would happen. The move was her idea. She had gotten a job offer at Wells Fargo and found him a position at a start-up. She reasoned that they would never get to live in California ever again, and he
Choate
(her italics). Their relationship had taken on easy contours from the start. In a nice private-school way, she and Mel were well aligned and stayed so for years.
Whenever she felt bored, she’d ask Mel to take her down to visit his family in Providence. There, she would sit down at one of those Italian feasts they show in those movies, with gigantic
happy
women(her words) who wore gold jewelry and drove American cars and men who smelled like trashy women. It was Mel’s family, more than Mel himself, that kept Performance Fleece around. She had always shown an interest in other cultures. (I snickered at this, but after she stabbed me in the back of the hand with a cocktail straw, I shut up.)
No
, not lame, like
that
. Not like those girls who travel abroad to
Tibet
or some fucked-up place and take 16-mm photos of poor children playing
soccer
, but more like I was interested in
fucking
a lot of different types of guys, like in middle school, I gave one of the METCO kids a blowjob after he got done with football practice. At Choate, I stole out of my dorm and let two of the Mexican guys who worked in the dining hall fondle and suck on my breasts, for like an hour, and rub me. Over the pants. (Again, her words. Note: longest sentence I had heard out of her. Plus, she giggled.)
She did not know why she stayed with Mel for all those years. Maybe the stability of the logic behind their union helped her with the guilt she felt over her true inner slut. Or maybe she did love his family enough to lease out their son. Maybe Boston just didn’t make sense to her without Mel. They had the same friends, they ate at the same five restaurants, they drank at the same two bars, they shopped at the same supermarket, and both took the T to Downtown Crossing. Love and cities are always inextricably entwined. There’s no restaurant or corner store or run-down dive in any city that doesn’t double as a monument for a lost love. I think that’s why we always stop and stare whenever we come across a girl crying in public. We sense the imprint of a memory being pressed onto the sidewalk, onto the building contours, onto the names of the streets.
Boston, Performance Fleece explained, had become just a photo reelof her years with Mel. In the first frame, she and Mel move her mom’s old furniture into the bottom floor of a run-down duplex in Cambridgeport. Farther along the reel, after having lived all over Boston, they stand smiling next to a SOLD sign. She had just accepted the progression of these images, just as she had accepted Choate, lacrosse camp, Williams, and, ultimately, Mel. Then, one day, for reasons unknown, she simply didn’t. Everything became ugly to her—the hats the cashiers at Dunkin’ Donuts had to wear, the grease on the handgrips on the T, the excess butter served with the bread at Bertucci’s, the endless talk about the Red Sox, the droves of pale, mute Chinese kids, forever shuttling on the Red Line between Kendall/MIT and Harvard Square, the green everywhere on Saint Patrick’s Day and the kids who never took an interest in anything other than Tom Brady suddenly asking one another what part of Ireland their people were from, the constant questions from their married friends about when they were going to “repay the party,” the drabness of the drive on the 2 up to her parents’ house in Beverly, the only stretch of road in America where the trees are bare year-round, the bartender at their neighborhood bar, a guy Mel described as “the salt of the earth,” and his stupid philosophy about what constituted “honest work,” mostly stolen from
Good Will Hunting
.
When they left Boston for San Francisco, the scaffolding of their love fell away. She had known this would happen. The move was her idea. She had gotten a job offer at Wells Fargo and found him a position at a start-up. She reasoned that they would never get to live in California ever again, and he
Similar Books
