In Stereo Where Available Page 8

  “No, that’s Jerry’s. I don’t like root beer.”

  “That’s my point. Men aren’t supposed to do things like that. It’s women who do the leave-behind thing. Scrunchies and earrings and things like that. Men don’t.”

  “It’s not a leave-behind thing. It’s just practical. He’s been over here two Thursdays in a row, and it makes more sense to leave it here than to bring over a can of it every week.”

  “You’re one to talk about practical. I’m telling you, you really ought to let me set you up with Brad before you get too fixated on Jerry. Just give him a try, Fee. He really wants to meet you.”

  “You mentioned me to him?”

  “Not exactly. Well, sort of. We can do it like a double date, okay? Me and Prabath and you guys. He’s so right for you. He’s an AB-group Taurus. For an A-group Pisces, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

  “I thought you said I was an INFP.”

  “That’s your Myers-Briggs type. I’m talking about your blood type this time. I bet you don’t even know what blood type Jerry is.”

  “No idea. I know he’s a Cancer, though. I thought you said water signs go together.”

  “Yeah, but he must have something weird on the cusp. Even a guy who’s a Cancer can’t be that pro-commitment unless he’s a little mental. How long did you and Bill go out? Three months?”

  “Yeah, three and a half, four. Something like that.”

  “And I don’t remember Bill ever leaving anything over here. See, that was nice and normal. A date on Saturday night and then get on with your life for the rest of the week.”

  I turned on the heat under a pan of chicken broth and set a chicken breast in it. “That’s because Bill is an extremely ambitious grad student who never does anything but work on programming projects. He also still lives with his mother and couldn’t get together on Friday nights because he was watching old episodes of Dr. Who on the Sci-Fi Channel.”

  “He was a little, uh, geeky.”

  “I like geeky guys. Jerry’s geeky, too. He plays Scrabble with a dictionary. He’s on a different level from Bill, though. His geekiness doesn’t interfere with his life.”

  “You guys play Scrabble together? See, I need a guy like that. I kick ass at Scrabble. Maybe I need to be more open to guys who are Leos. They’re competitive. Or the intellectual guys in 20912.”

  I shrugged. “Or you could try returning wrong-number phone calls.”

  Lauren threw her hands up in the air and walked away from me. “I’m just going to have to convince myself that there’s some kind of numerology operating there somewhere.”

  Holly, the school speech therapist, nudged me with her elbow as I spooned French onion dip onto my little pink-and-blue paper plate. “I see your sister behaved herself last night,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

  I sighed. “Yeah. You never know, though, with Madison. Next week she could shave off the Southern girls’ eyebrows in their sleep or something.”

  Holly giggled. “That could be fun. Boy, that Rhett guy sure is cute, isn’t he? He’s got everything but the white horse.”

  Antonia came over to the table with a bowl of mini gherkins, setting it down beside the tub of ice cream. “I read he actually went to West Point, just like the real Rhett Butler.”

  “The real Rhett Butler got kicked out of West Point,” I reminded her.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Holly. “I think he must have gone to Princeton or someplace like that. He’s got that whole blue-blooded, Martha’s Vineyard thing going.”

  “You think?” I asked doubtfully.

  “I think it’s just his look,” said Antonia. “I’m pretty sure I saw him in a Tommy Hilfiger ad once.”

  Holly pointed to the pickles and ice cream beside each other on the table. “Does Claire actually expect us to eat those things together?”

  Antonia shrugged. “It’s a baby shower. Who knows? Sarah might have requested it. Phoebe, did your mom ever say anything about having weird cravings when she was pregnant with twins?”

  “Only when she’s whining about what an insensitive jerk our father was to her. She said she wanted sweet-and-sour shrimp all the time, but he got sick of Chinese food and said she was spending too much money.”

  “Nice. Hey, Sarah, did you hear that?”

  The guest of honor followed her belly into the dining room, ducking under the little shower of tissue-paper baby booties her best friend had hung in the doorway. She made a face and pushed down against the top of her stomach with her hand. “Somebody’s got their feet in my lungs,” she said.

  “You ought to ask Phoebe for advice,” Antonia told her. “I bet she knows all the secrets of how twins conspire against their parents.”

  “She’s having a girl and a boy, though,” I reminded Antonia. “That’s totally different from having identical twin girls. If you ask me, it’ll be a lot easier.”

  Sarah dug the scoop into the marble-fudge ice cream, removing about half of it from the container at once. “Why is that?”

  “Because there’s nothing worse than having two little girls going through all the same stages at exactly the same times. There’s the dramatic four-year-old stage, and the mouthy six-year-old stage, and the hypercritical eight-year-old stage, and that’s before you even get to middle school. There’s not enough wall space in a house for two girls who are both going through the obsessed-with-boy-bands stage.”

  Holly laughed. “Which band were you guys obsessed with?”

  “The NYC Boyz,” I told her. “Remember them? There were five of them, and they did really nice harmonies on all these awful songs—”

  “I remember them,” said Sarah happily, swallowing a mouthful of ice cream and waving her spoon in the air. “They did ‘Dancin’ after Midnight.’ I had a crush on Clint. He was the hot one.”

  “He was the blond hot one,” Holly corrected. “I had a thing for the Hispanic hot one. José. I wonder if that was his real name.”

  Antonia smiled at me. “So did you and Madison have a crush on the same one?”

  “Of course not. She was obsessed with Derek, the ‘bad boy’ one who always wore a motorcycle jacket. I was in love with C. J. Anastasio.”

  “The clean-cut one,” Antonia remembered. “That sounds like you.”

  We wandered out to the living room, and I sat down on the far side of the sofa with my plate of veggies and dip in my lap. “I can still remember everything about him,” I said wistfully. “His birthday is July 8th. He likes Chicago-style hot dogs and Hawaiian Punch, his favorite subject is math, and he likes girl-next-door types.”

  “Is that what sold you?” asked Sarah. “You thought you had a chance with him?”

  I ran a piece of broccoli through the dip. “What do you mean, had?”

  Antonia laughed, putting a hand over her mouth self-consciously. “Awwww,” she said in a little-kid warning voice. “I’m gonna tell your boyfriend.”

  Holly perked up. “Phoebe has a boyfriend? How did I miss that?”

  “He teaches at Kensington,” said Antonia. I elbowed her in the arm, but she just wiped the ranch dip from the side of her thumb and added, “Jerry Sullivan.”

  Holly’s face lit up with a rapturous smile. “Jerry Sullivan! No kidding!”

  I paused with a red grape halfway to my mouth. “You know him?”

  “Sorta kinda. When I was at Lincoln Middle School, I shared an office with the chick he was seeing at the time. Serena. Guidance counselor. Her car was always in the shop so he came to pick her up a lot.”

  I swallowed and rearranged my plate on my other knee, feeling my heart beat a little harder. In my mind I could hear Lauren loudly chewing me out over how stupid it was to feel jealous. After all, hadn’t our relationship begun with his effort to pick up somebody else?

  “Nice guy,” she continued. “Quiet. Probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise with Serena, anyway. I ran into him at a conference over the summer, as a matter of fact. I said hi, but he did
n’t recognize me.”

  “A conference?” Suddenly my interest shifted from Serena to Karen the Mystery Girl. “Was there a woman named Karen there?”

  Holly shrugged. “I dunno. Could have been. I just did my workshops and went home.”

  “But not that you remember?” I persisted.

  She shook her head and dug her spoon into her ice cream. “Nope.” Taking a bite, she went on, “I’m not surprised to hear they’re not together anymore. I’m sure she’s moved on to make some other guy miserable.”

  I grinned. “Go on, keep telling me how awful she was. It’s good for my self-esteem.”

  Holly rolled her eyes and wadded up her napkin in her fist. “Get comfortable,” she said. “We might be talking until Sarah gives birth.”

  Saturday was my Aquarium day with Jerry. I was waiting outside my apartment building when he pulled up in his little Volkswagen Jetta with Betsy and Marco crammed into their car seats in the back. He parked the car at the curb and walked around to the passenger side door to open it for me.

  “Thank you,” I said, slipping into the seat. He closed the door gently, and I turned around to smile at the kids. “Hi, guys.”

  “Hi,” Betsy whispered. She was eating Goldfish crackers from a Cheerio-shaped plastic container with a small flip-up lid. Her chin was covered in dusty orange crumbs. Marco was asleep.

  “We’re going to see some real fish, aren’t we?” I asked her.

  She nodded solemnly. “Yes.”

  “Don’t mind her,” said Jerry, getting back in on the driver’s side and putting his seat belt back on. “By the end of the day, she’ll be bouncing off the walls.”

  “I’m sure your sister appreciates the break.”

  “Yeah, well, I feel bad for her. She’s still really upset about what happened with her husband. Giving her a place to live and getting the kids out of her hair once in a while is the least I can do.”

  “Can I ask what happened with her husband?”

  He dropped his voice and turned the radio balance toward the back of the car. “He cheated on her with some woman he met on the Internet. It didn’t sound like it was the first time. Maybe she just got fed up, I don’t know. I never liked the guy in the first place.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was always profiling. You know, talking about how big and successful he was, what a big football star he was in college. Always talked louder than everyone else. He’s a putz.” He readjusted the radio balance. “Speaking of family, you said you’ve got a stepbrother, right? He’s the only one in your family you’ve never told me about.”

  “Yeah, it’s complicated. He’s my stepmom’s son by her first marriage. His name is Pete.”

  “Do you get along with him?”

  “I get along great with him. I don’t see him very much, though. He lives on a cruise ship most of the time. He works a lot of holidays because he’s a minister. A lot of people want to get married over Christmas and Easter and things like that, at sea.”

  “That sounds like an interesting job.”

  “He’s an interesting guy. His partner works on the ship, too, as a chef. That’s where they met. His name is Dominic.”

  Jerry peered down at his side-view mirror to merge onto the highway. “What does your family think of that?”

  “They don’t care. I mean, we all like Dominic. He’s Filipino. He makes a great chocolate truffle cake.”

  Jerry was right about Betsy. She perked up during the dolphin show, giggling as they caught rings on their noses and did their little swimming tricks. By the time we’d finished looking at all of the exhibits, she was chattering our ears off and starting to negotiate for what she would be allowed to get from the gift shop.

  “One stuffed animal,” said Jerry.

  “But I need an eraser for my eraser collection.”

  “One eraser, then.”

  “But I need a stuffed animal for my stuffed animal collection.”

  “One or the other.”

  We made our way toward the exit walkway. A giant, three-story aquarium surrounded the ramps on three sides. Somewhere around the middle, the sharks swam by, their slow slippery bodies scattering the smaller fish around them. At the bottom, where we were, green seaweed waved like mermaid hair; anemones in all shades of pink and fuchsia made little sucking motions, and little yellow fish nibbled at them before zooming suddenly upward, as though startled or stung.

  “Whoa,” said Betsy.

  “Like being underwater, isn’t it?” asked Jerry.

  “Yeah. Like being a fish.”

  In the stroller, Marco had fallen asleep. His little chipmunk cheeks were relaxed, fat little legs curled up beside him. Jerry pushed the stroller toward the ramp, weaving his way past all the people who had stopped still, staring up at the surrounding water.

  “My sister used to want to be a mermaid,” I mentioned.

  Jerry looked over at me. “She did?”

  “Yeah. That’s how she got her nickname. From the movie Splash. When we were kids she’d put on her swimsuit top and a long skirt and safety-pin it really tight in the back, so it was like a tail, and pretend to do the backstroke on the carpet. I guess she was waiting for Tom Hanks to come along.”

  “Still is.”

  “Yeah, I guess she is, isn’t she? I hope she wins. I think she has a good shot at Rhett, don’t you think?”

  He stopped on the landing. We were only halfway up to the second story. People flowed by from behind us; Betsy leaned against the metal railing, her shoulders and chin bunched up against it. “Look, there goes a shark,” she said.

  I watched the shark go by, then turned back to Jerry. “You know, maybe if she—”

  He put his hand under my chin and I caught my breath, heart racing, its rhythm pounding in my neck and in my ears, and when he kissed me he wrapped his arm around my waist to pull me closer, his other hand still resting on the stroller. I closed my eyes, drifting along into the touch of his lips, the pressure of his hand on my waist, the deep muted somnolent sound of the water. He kissed me slowly until Betsy tugged on the bottom of his T-shirt, his lips still parted as he moved away, his stone-blue eyes still locked on mine.

  “Can I have my stuffed animal now?” she asked.

  On Monday morning my mother left four hysterical voice-mail messages on my phone. I called her back on my break, hiding in the teachers’ lounge that was empty except for a nineteen-year-old student teacher with a fairy tattoo on the small of her back and a stack of worksheets to photocopy.

  “Will you please explain this thing I just read in the Star?” she asked indignantly.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t read the Star.”

  “Well, I don’t, either, you know. I was just having a piece of pecan pie at the linger-longer after church yesterday when Rosalie Welsh—do you remember Rosalie Welsh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rosalie Welsh comes up to me and apologizes for what she read about my daughter. So you don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  I heard the sound of paper wrinkling, being folded. “Former Playboy Playmate Looking for Love,” she read aloud.

  “Mom, okay. First of all, she wasn’t a Playmate.”

  The college student at the copy machine glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. My mother kept reading, her voice rising in a blend of accusation and dismay. “Grace Kassner, twenty-four-year-old Maryland schoolteacher and Belle of Georgia bad girl—”

  “Mom, stop. She had a really short part in a Playboy video, like thirteen seconds, but she wasn’t even naked. She had everything, uh, covered.”

  “It says right here that she was a Playmate.”

  “In the Star. Yeah. It also says she’s a school teacher, right? None of these people seem to do a lot of fact-checking.”

  “Honestly, Phoebe. This is not the way I raised you girls. Every week I brought you to church. Every week. Even during that
horrible divorce when I didn’t even want to get out of bed. And this is what I have to show for it. My own daughter in the Star. In Playboy. I’m beside myself. I don’t even know what to say to you.”

  “Well, nothing, I hope. I’m just her twin, remember? I didn’t pose for Playboy, Mom, I swear. Neither did Madison, actually, but—”

  “A video. My daughter, the actress. Nobody ever told me she was doing pornography. Oh, just wait until you have children of your own. Then you’ll understand what it’s like to have Rosalie Welsh of all people, with her daughter pregnant at seventeen, apologizing to me about my daughter. I could die.”

  “Look, save it for Madison, okay? It wasn’t my idea. You chewing me out about what she did isn’t going to do any of us any—”

  “When was this, if I may ask? This video of hers?”

  “About six years ago, I think. Right after her, uh, surgery.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake. You know, I blame your father. There’s only so much I can do when he takes off with some oversexed secretary and sets such a lovely example for his pre-teen daughters. I’m sorry, Phoebe, I can’t take any more of this conversation. I’ll call you in a few days when my nerves aren’t so much on edge.”

  I turned off my phone and let my head drop back to rest against the back of the sofa. The college student at the copy machine turned around and smiled at me shyly. “You’re her sister?” she asked. “Really?”

  Lauren was on a date the next time Thursday rolled around, and so Jerry and I decided to watch Belle of Georgia at my place again. It was the first time I’d seen him since our Aquarium trip, and just seeing him through the peephole made my pulse go up to about three hundred and forty beats a minute. I had it bad. Radio songs had taken on an eerie significance. I was suddenly aware of the shoddiness of my underwear collection. And the night before, while I was supposed to be typing up “Ms. Kassner’s All-Star Class Report” to send home in my students’ folders, I’d ended up typing nineteen variations on “Mrs. Phoebe Sullivan,” each in a different font, color, or style. My fifteen-year-old sister would have rolled her eyes and told me I was acting juvenile.