“So you’re doing an apprenticeship in landscaping. You’re earning money and learning a skill that will support your writing after college,” I said. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“Oh, I won’t be doing this kind of work after college,” he said, sounding amused. “I’ll go to graduate school.”
“Oh, and then teach?”
“Perhaps at a university, where I could write,” he replied. “I wouldn’t be caught dead teaching high school.”
I decided not to remind him that my father did.
“There’s a rebel in me,” he said, then reached for my face, turning it toward him. “And there’s a natural, independent spirit in you. We’re good for each other.” He played with the necklace, then kissed me again, his mouth pressing against mine.
At that moment fireworks exploded in the air. Above the baseball stadium, I mean. Above Camden Yards, which was close to the waterfront. I remembered that during last night’s broadcast they had advertised Fireworks Night, with a display after the game. I wondered if the Orioles had won.
And then I wondered why I was wondering about a baseball game while I was in the middle of a romantic kiss. I sighed, then so did Andrew, but I think it may have been for different reasons. What did it take to send off fireworks in me?
Chapter 14
Saturday morning I woke up at seven. I was tired, but sleepless. After tugging on shorts and a T-shirt, I tiptoed downstairs, carrying my sneakers, hoping that Mom and Viktor were still asleep.
“Good morning!” Viktor was stuffing fruit into a blender.
“G’morning,” I mumbled, immediately feeling cross.
“I didn’t think you would be up this early,” Viktor said.
My thoughts exactly, I felt like responding, then caught myself. Okay, Jamie, he isn’t any happier about this arrangement than you are. Give the guy a break. Try to get along.
“I’m tired, but I feel kind of restless. I thought I’d go out for a walk.”
“If I ask you how your date was last night, will you bite my head off?”
“No, I’m not that hungry yet,” I said, then laughed. “That was a joke, Viktor. I had a nice time. The harbor was incredible.”
He smiled. It was that slow-spreading smile, and maybe if I had seen it without being ready to dislike him as my mother’s lover, I would have found it appealing. In Hollywood terms, it was a sexy smile. In my terms, I no longer knew what was sexy or romantic. In the movie world, Andrew would have been IT, but the truth was, I had enjoyed kissing that jerk who had wanted to play tight end a lot more. Maybe I expected too much.
“Do you like mangoes?” Viktor asked, studying the array of fruit in front of him.
“I love them, but you should make your juice however you like it.”
“I’m happy to share, Jamie,” he replied. “I have to get to work, but I’ll leave a pitcher chilling in the fridge for you. Take your walk, do some easy stretches, have a juice breakfast, then go back to bed. You put your body through boot camp this week, you have to give those muscles some rest.”
He was trying, he really was. I smiled at him. “Thanks, Coach.”
I followed Viktor’s prescription, and when I woke up at noon, I felt good. I found Mom typing in the little room behind the living room, with Brad and Andrea roosting comfortably outside the window on the AC unit. They cocked their heads and peered in at me as I entered.
“Hi, baby,” my mother said. “One more paragraph.”
Don’t stop.”
“Almost there. Just need him to break this thing off with her,” she added.
“Who’s breaking things off, Brad?” I asked.
She nodded. “Poor fool. Andrea’s rival has conned him. He’s wildly in love with Andrea, but has so many self-doubts, that he was ripe for the picking. And Maggie knows it. She wants him just for the money.”
“Well, I hope Maggie gets what she deserves in the end.”
“Oh, she will,” Mom promised. “I’ve got a big surprise waiting in my outline!”
I picked up a printed sheet that had drifted to the floor, and read through its penciled corrections:
His lips drifted onward, careless, enticing tantalizing teasing? leaving her breathless with desire making each breath quick and ragged with desire.
Did Mom write sex scenes from her own experience, I wondered, or did she make most of it up? I set down the page.
“Done. Saved.” Mom pushed back from her laptop. “How was last night?”
“It was fun.”
“Fun is nice,” she said. “Are you going out tonight?”
“No.”
She stretched, looking for a moment like a pretty cat, trying to seem casual and uninterested in her prey, but I knew she wanted to pounce with questions. How do you explain to a mother who writes about “breath ragged with desire” that you want to spend Saturday night with a bowl of chips and ESPN?
I watched as Mom stood up, crossed one leg over the other, then bent at the waist, flopping over to touch the floor. Her blonde curls, which had been pulled up on top of her head, bounced around her upside-down face. “Viktor told me I should exercise before and after writing.”
“Good idea.”
“About Andrew,” Mom said, and I stiffened. “Perhaps it’s your turn to do the asking, to invite him somewhere. I have a weekend guide—”
“He’s doing a poetry reading tonight. He’s part of a group scheduled at the Bistro or somewhere.”
“Well, then, we could surprise him and go!” she said.
I imagined his face when Mom showed up with her blue alligator purse, jeweled sandals, and the large daisy earrings that were bobbing on her ears at the moment. He’d be surprised all right. “No, I already told him I wasn’t coming.”
“He asked you, and you said no?”
“A girl doesn’t have to accept every invitation, Mom.”
“True,” she agreed, straightening, her face now right-side up and pink, “but poets are very sensitive about being listened to.”
“Everyone likes to be listened to! I don’t see why poets have more right than anyone else.”
Mom had begun an arm-whirling thing, and the windmill slowed momentarily as she glanced sideways at me.
“Sorry, I didn’t meant to snap at you,” I said. “Anyway, is there a video store around here?”
“Yes, but how about a girls’ night out instead?” she suggested. “Viktor has clients straight through this evening. We could go to a late afternoon movie in Towson, then grab dinner, and do some shopping at the mall. My treat.”
She noticed my reluctance. “Or we could just do one of those things,” she said.
It wasn’t that I was embarrassed to be seen spending Saturday night with my mother. I just wanted to be alone. The past week had been crammed with new people, challenging situations, and feelings so strange I didn’t recognize them. Just for a night, I wanted to hibernate from summer in the city.
But I had come crashing into Mom’s life, pushed her out of her own office, messed up her writing schedule, and annoyed her boyfriend. And she had been great about it. “I’ll drive, if you navigate,” I said. “It will help me learn my way around here. Do you have the movie listings?”
Three hours later we set out for Towson, a suburb north of Baltimore and about twenty minutes from Hampden. As I drove in slow circles around a parking garage, we argued over which movie we were going to see. Mom had picked an adventure film she thought I’d be interested in, and I’d chosen a love story that I knew she’d like. The problem was, I wanted to see it, too, but was having trouble admitting it was my first choice.
“Look, Mom,” I said at last, “I saw the video of Sleepless in Seattle four times. Okay?”
“Baby,” she said, “you really are my daughter!”
It sure looked that way by the end of the movie. Mom and I both had the tissues out and emerged into the lobby lights blinking our salty eyes and giggling self-consciously.
“There?
??s nothing like tragic love to make me hungry,” Mom said. “What are you in the mood for?”
“What do you they have around here?”
“Everything. Sushi, Italian, seafood…junk food at the mall’s food court,” she added with a conspiratorial smile.
“A food court with a place that sells giant-size chocolate chip cookies?”
“The chips are as big as quarters.”
“Let’s go.”
We got Chinese from the food court and decided to shop before dessert. I had thought my friend Abby was the US gold medalist in shopping, but comparing her to my mother was like comparing a 5K runner to a marathoner. Abby shopped for herself and sometimes for me, picking out stuff she thought I should try on. My mother shopped for herself, me, and her characters.
“This is just what Maggie would wear!” she said, holding up loungewear that no other teen’s mother would have held up to her daughter. She had coaxed me into Victoria’s Secret and insisted on buying me something. I knew I’d never be able to sleep in the lacy nightie she was eyeing for me. I ended up leaving the store with a bra and panties so sexy, when I wore them I’d probably blush just remembering what I had on underneath. We picked out dishes and barware for Brad at Crate &Barrel, then found shoes for Andrea at Nordstrom’s. Mom couldn’t resist fancy soap from Crabtree & Evelyn—like we didn’t have enough at home already. Then we went to Hecht’s, and Mom pointed out furniture for the woman who had been sitting two tables away from us at the food court. That bit of interior decorating had begun with my simple observation that the woman’s date looked kind of grumpy. My mother had then spun out an entire story line about their past and present together, as well as this woman’s future. Now the woman had a roomful of furniture to go with the new life Mom had developed for her. For Rita Carvelli, shopping wasn’t just about buying things, it was a creative experience.
Finally back at the food court, with just twenty minutes before the mall shut down, we collapsed onto plastic chairs, munching on large chocolate chip cookies and sipping coffee. I felt an unexpected kind of contentment. Somehow, during the course of the last six hours, moments of silence had become relaxed.
My mother sat back in her chair and sighed happily. Then I saw her surveying the food court.
“Looking for more characters? You should try airports, Mom.”
“Inspiration is everywhere,” she said. “I am getting better at seeing it in the quiet ones, people who go about their everyday life with secret dreams.”
I set down my latte. “I guess we all have them.”
“If you’re human, you have them,” she replied. “What do you think Ted’s secret dreams are?”
“Ted’s?”
“He carries the dreams his parents have for him, of course. I think it must be hard to be a child of achieving parents.”
I sipped and thought about him. “Now you’ve got me curious.”
“But not interested,” my mother observed, and took a bite of her cookie.
“What do you mean?”
“Not romantically interested.”
“In Ted? He’s a friend. I can’t imagine me getting romantic about him, or him about me. He’s a fantastic guy, and I know he’d be great for some girl, but him and me? I can’t even picture it. Besides, I left behind a million guy-friends who like to talk sports. I want…something different.”
“Like Andrew,” my mother replied.
I didn’t want to discuss him with her, so I kept to a definition. “Like someone who makes me tingle, someone who sees me in a crowd of people and thinks”—I hesitated, feeling silly saying something I couldn’t imagine actually happening to me—“thinks about something other than the fact that he’d like to be on my father’s team, or he’d like to have me on his team in a pick-up game.”
My mother gazed at me thoughtfully. “Someone who looks in your eyes and feels his heart hammering against his ribs?” she suggested. “Someone who thinks that he would give anything to hold you in his arms? Someone who thinks that he would die to kiss you?”
“That sounds good,” I said, grimacing with the effort to imagine it.
“You’re cynical about love.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Because of your father and me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Because ours didn’t last.”
“No,” I replied. “No, that’s really not it. I’ve just had some bad luck with guys, and when it blows up in your face, it’s miserable. Actually, it hasn’t been much better for my friends. I don’t know why it should be so hard for two people to fall in love and stay in love for more than a week. It seems like romance should happen naturally or something, but I find sports a lot easier.”
“Well,” she said, “Andrew certainly knows how to woo a girl.”
I detected the dry note in her voice. “Was that a put-down?”
“An observation, baby, just an observation. He seems very romantic. I can understand why you’d want to go out with him.”
Could she understand why I felt like an actress in a romantic film rather than a girl actually falling for a guy? Maybe I expected too much too soon. Maybe I just had to play the part for a while and wait for it to happen. “I guess that, for some people, love grows slowly,” I said.
My mother nodded. “Some people fall head over heels. Other people begin to fall without even knowing it—love grows like a spring flower beneath last autumn’s leaves and catches them by surprise. I plot it both ways in my books.”
“Well, you’re the expert,” I said, then saw a grimace on her face.
“On paper,” she replied, “on paper.”
Chapter 15
When we arrived home that night, there was a message from Ted on the answering machine. “Hey, Jamie. I’m painting the living room tomorrow, so I’ll have the game on inside. If you can stand the smell of paint and are just hanging out, come over.” I saw the disappointment on Mom’s face when she heard Ted’s voice, and I knew she had hoped it was Viktor.
Nine o’clock Sunday morning Viktor arrived and settled into making breakfast, fussing over my mother, insisting that she put her feet up and read the paper. When I asked him for one of his juice concoctions, he made a pleased fuss over that, too.
Mona drove up at eleven thirty and we walked to The Avenue. Her hair was pulled back as usual, showing off her gorgeous eyes and cheekbones, but today her long braids were uncoiled, swinging loose down her back, dancing whenever she laughed. From a shop called Oh, Said Rose, she bought earrings that also swung. We tried on vintage hats at Fat Elvis, then I squeezed my feet into several pairs of fabulous slip-ons at Ma Petite Shoe, but we only bought truffles there—the store sold shoes and chocolate—what more could a girl want?
During a late lunch at Café Hon, Mona pulled from her bag several copies of coaching schedules that had been used at the basketball camps in previous years. Each of us was assigned ten players who would be entering sixth to eighth grade, but that didn’t tell us as much as we’d need to know to decide on drills and teaching points. We talked through all the possibilities so that we would be ready for whatever level of player showed up.
While Mona and I were working with middle school girls, Todd and Jake, two of the guys who I’d met through Josh on Friday, would be coaching middle school boys in basketball. Josh and Sam, the friendly blond guy, would be running the lacrosse camp for middle school boys.
“Sam is Josh’s teammate at Hopkins,” Mona informed me. “He’s a defenseman—Josh says he’s aggressive and a wild man on the field, but a marshmallow off.”
The six of us, plus two more girls, would be working the weeklong afternoon camp with elementary school kids, grades two though five. The coaches and counselors had met before lacrosse camp, so Ms. Mahler had given Mona the notes from that meeting and asked her to go over them with me. Another eight A.M. meeting was scheduled Monday to straighten out any last-minute problems. I was excited and couldn’t wait to tell Dad the news
that his baby girl was coaching.
Mona and I were eating after the peak lunch hour, so we sat at our table for a long time, unrushed by the waitress, stirring the crushed ice in our glasses and talking. We switched from camp and sports to college hopes.
“So, what’s the status with Andrew?” she asked.
“We were talking about colleges,” I replied.
“Well, he’s a college guy,” she reasoned. “But even if he wasn’t, I wouldn’t let you off the hook that easily. Friday, you had plans for the most romantic date gone on by any girl I actually know, and”—she looked at her watch—“since we started down The Avenue more than three hours ago, you haven’t mentioned it.”
“It was fun.”
She rolled her eyes. “I guess you didn’t inherit your mother’s skill for details. I bought one of her books and started it Friday night.”
When Mona arrived at the house, she and my mother had hit it off immediately, just as Josh and Mom had. For some reason, Mom could get away with asking my friends questions that other parents couldn’t. Maybe it was her tone—intrigued rather than judgmental—like she was researching a story.
“We ate at The Rusty Scupper,” I said, then thought to add a detail, “a window table. We walked some streets in Fells Point—they were cobblestone. Later on we saw fireworks over Camden Yards. It was a Friday night promotion by the Orioles.”
“Girlfriend, that’s a travel article, not a romance.”
I fingered my green stone necklace. “I got this at Fells Point.”
“It’s awesome with your eyes! So, did he give it to you or did you buy it yourself?”
“I wanted to buy it myself, but he gave it to me.”
Mona sighed. “Maybe you’re traveling to romance, but you sure aren’t there yet. Is there any chance of me getting a look at this guy?”
“Well, Ted’s home today, painting, and said to come over and hang out if I wanted.”
“Ted is your stoop-sitting buddy, Andrew’s roommate?”