mine.
“Think that will make your father jealous?” Oliver had said.
“Oh, right,” my father said. “That old guy you lived with.”
“Right.” I swallowed. Strange, when I was working so hard to diminish my own sorrow, how much it hurt to have him diminish it.
“I always thought that was kind of weird.” My father chuckled. “It wasn’t some kind of Anna Nicole Smith situation, was it?”
“You bet,” I said. “You raised yourself a gold digger.”
My father laughed. “Well,” he said. “I tried.”
After I hung up, the apartment seemed even quieter than before. I treated the place like a crime scene, trying to disturb nothing. I drank from a glass and then washed it and put it away. It seemed too strange to sleep in Sonia’s bed, so I lay down on the couch, even though I had to curl up tight to fit, with only the blanket and a fat, square pillow for bedding. From outside came the distant sound of sirens. I couldn’t shake a betrayed, abandoned feeling. Every night, before Oliver went to bed, he used to kiss me good night, chastely, like a parent, but also like a child. A day seemed incomplete without that kiss to signal its end.
Many times I had been the new girl in the cafeteria, holding her tray, searching the room for that face that will smile, that will say,
Sit here, you’re welcome
—and will do it before the moment goes on too long, before she and the whole room see that nobody wants her, that she doesn’t, and never will, belong. Still, lying there on Sonia’s couch, that might have been the loneliest moment of my life.
In the middle of the night I woke up cold, with a terrible crick in my neck. I stumbled through the door to Sonia’s room, and, moving as if in a dream, I got into Sonia’s bed.
10
S onia and I used to call ourselves Cameronia, and Sonia drew a logo for us, a wreath of flowers, in the center a
C
and an
S
intertwined. It was beautiful, the fantastical shapes of the flowers, the extravagant loops of the
C
and the
S,
so long they almost didn’t look like letters anymore. They ran together in unbroken curves, our two identities made one.
That was how it was when we were fifteen, when every experience was something we shared. We even wrote each other into our memories, so that Sonia would make reference to something that had happened two years before and be surprised when I reminded her I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t even lived in Clovis then. “That’s so crazy,” she’d say, because it no longer seemed possible that there had been a time when we weren’t friends.
We both reached the age of fifteen without ever having kissed a boy. Even this was a problem we confronted together. When we imagined ridding ourselves of this embarrassment, we thought of finding two acceptable boys who would kiss us at the same time—it never occurred to either of us that one of us could go it alone.
One Saturday, when her mother went to bed at three o’clock, Sonia was finally able to put into motion the plan we’d been making for weeks, by asking her father for permission to go out when her mother wasn’t around to say no. That evening we sat at Sonia’s kitchen table while her father made dinner—spaghetti and meatballs, which was his specialty and Sonia’s favorite. She was sketching my portrait, intermittently frowning at it and erasing furiously, refusing to let me see. The smell of tomato sauce filled the house.
We had our driver’s licenses by then, and my father had bought me an old car, a stick shift he’d spent all summer teaching me how to drive, shouting obscenities when I ground the gears and then screaming at me to relax. He said if I knew how to drive a stick, boys would respect me more, but this was the least of my concerns when it came to boys. In seventh grade I’d had a huge crush on a boy named Mitch, but he had a friend named Ronnie who used to tease me, calling me Green Giant, asking me in a loud voice in the hall what my cup size was.
“Think that will make your father jealous?” Oliver had said.
“Oh, right,” my father said. “That old guy you lived with.”
“Right.” I swallowed. Strange, when I was working so hard to diminish my own sorrow, how much it hurt to have him diminish it.
“I always thought that was kind of weird.” My father chuckled. “It wasn’t some kind of Anna Nicole Smith situation, was it?”
“You bet,” I said. “You raised yourself a gold digger.”
My father laughed. “Well,” he said. “I tried.”
After I hung up, the apartment seemed even quieter than before. I treated the place like a crime scene, trying to disturb nothing. I drank from a glass and then washed it and put it away. It seemed too strange to sleep in Sonia’s bed, so I lay down on the couch, even though I had to curl up tight to fit, with only the blanket and a fat, square pillow for bedding. From outside came the distant sound of sirens. I couldn’t shake a betrayed, abandoned feeling. Every night, before Oliver went to bed, he used to kiss me good night, chastely, like a parent, but also like a child. A day seemed incomplete without that kiss to signal its end.
Many times I had been the new girl in the cafeteria, holding her tray, searching the room for that face that will smile, that will say,
Sit here, you’re welcome
—and will do it before the moment goes on too long, before she and the whole room see that nobody wants her, that she doesn’t, and never will, belong. Still, lying there on Sonia’s couch, that might have been the loneliest moment of my life.
In the middle of the night I woke up cold, with a terrible crick in my neck. I stumbled through the door to Sonia’s room, and, moving as if in a dream, I got into Sonia’s bed.
10
S onia and I used to call ourselves Cameronia, and Sonia drew a logo for us, a wreath of flowers, in the center a
C
and an
S
intertwined. It was beautiful, the fantastical shapes of the flowers, the extravagant loops of the
C
and the
S,
so long they almost didn’t look like letters anymore. They ran together in unbroken curves, our two identities made one.
That was how it was when we were fifteen, when every experience was something we shared. We even wrote each other into our memories, so that Sonia would make reference to something that had happened two years before and be surprised when I reminded her I hadn’t been there, I hadn’t even lived in Clovis then. “That’s so crazy,” she’d say, because it no longer seemed possible that there had been a time when we weren’t friends.
We both reached the age of fifteen without ever having kissed a boy. Even this was a problem we confronted together. When we imagined ridding ourselves of this embarrassment, we thought of finding two acceptable boys who would kiss us at the same time—it never occurred to either of us that one of us could go it alone.
One Saturday, when her mother went to bed at three o’clock, Sonia was finally able to put into motion the plan we’d been making for weeks, by asking her father for permission to go out when her mother wasn’t around to say no. That evening we sat at Sonia’s kitchen table while her father made dinner—spaghetti and meatballs, which was his specialty and Sonia’s favorite. She was sketching my portrait, intermittently frowning at it and erasing furiously, refusing to let me see. The smell of tomato sauce filled the house.
We had our driver’s licenses by then, and my father had bought me an old car, a stick shift he’d spent all summer teaching me how to drive, shouting obscenities when I ground the gears and then screaming at me to relax. He said if I knew how to drive a stick, boys would respect me more, but this was the least of my concerns when it came to boys. In seventh grade I’d had a huge crush on a boy named Mitch, but he had a friend named Ronnie who used to tease me, calling me Green Giant, asking me in a loud voice in the hall what my cup size was.
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