People Who Knew Me Read online

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Are you sick?” he asked.

  I knew I could say that, but then he’d want to reschedule. Or bring me soup.

  “No, I’m fine. It’s just—I met someone.”

  “You met someone? In the few days since I asked you out?”

  “I know, it’s weird. It just happened. I wasn’t expecting it.”

  He sighed. I imagined him stepping on the heel of his dress shoe with one foot, then the other, taking them off, resigned to a night of staying in.

  “Well, bummer,” he said. “If it doesn’t work out, let me know.”

  “I will. Thank you for understanding.”

  “He’s a lucky guy, whoever he is.”

  “Thanks, Gabe. I’ll see you around.”

  And that was that.

  I was relieved for just a moment, before I got so anxious that I had to pee. I rifled through the drawers in the bathroom, in search of Jenny’s perfume. I spritzed myself twice, on each side of my neck.

  * * *

  My knock was tentative. Drew opened the door, surprised to see me.

  “I canceled.”

  He smiled like it was the best news he’d gotten in years, flung his arm out to the side, and said, “Come in!”

  He was in the middle of boiling a pot of water for pasta, which was impressive cooking according to my twenty-year-old self.

  “I’m assuming you need to eat, then,” he said.

  “Yeah, no more ‘dinner thing’ means no more dinner.”

  He dumped a box of noodles into the water.

  “What you did right there—that’s more cooking than I’ve ever done,” I said. “All of my eating is very microwave-based.”

  “I cooked for my mom growing up. I’m used to it,” he said. “If I can’t read for a living, maybe I’ll be a chef.”

  He’s a dreamer, I thought.

  I sat at the barstool, resting my elbows on the kitchen counter, chin in my hands, and watched him. In a separate pan, he melted butter and added flour until it became a thick paste.

  “A roux,” he said.

  “Fancy,” I said.

  Within minutes he had some kind of cream sauce simmering while the noodles cooked.

  “Was it just you and your mom?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “I saw my dad about once a year. He had a whole other family after us. My mom raised me. She’s paying for college. My dad—he’d show up to a baseball game, school awards ceremony, that kind of thing.”

  “School awards ceremony, huh? You a smarty pants or what?”

  “I went to public schools in Jersey. If you could count to ten, they’d put you in the accelerated learning classes.”

  I laughed. “I grew up in Jersey, too.”

  “I knew we had a lot in common.”

  He sat on the barstool beside mine, and rested his elbows on the counter. We filled the next few minutes talking nonstop, leapfrogging from one topic to another.

  “Close to your mom?” he asked.

  “Nope, not really,” I said, and he didn’t press further. I could tell already that he was close to his mom, a quintessential mama’s boy.

  “Dad?” he said. I shook my head. I never met my dad. My mom said I was the product of a one-night stand. That fact was given to me when I was too young to know what a one-night stand was. I protested once about not knowing my father and she said, “I never knew mine, either. You’ll get over it.”

  “Ever been in love?” he asked.

  I laughed uncomfortably. “You get right to it, huh?” I said.

  “May as well.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know if I have. You?”

  “Yes. I was six. And she was my first-grade teacher. It didn’t work out.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Quite the jokester,” I said, giving him a playful punch in the arm, as an excuse to touch him.

  It’s like he took that touch as a sign, because, without warning, he leaned from his barstool over to mine and kissed me. It was spontaneous, fast, and simple, as if it were the nine hundredth kiss he’d given me, as if we’d known each other for years already. I was dumbstruck.

  Then the timer beeped and he leapt up to drain the pasta. By the time he presented our gourmet-looking fettucine alfredo, too much time had passed since the kiss, so I didn’t say anything about it. I just hoped it would happen again.

  I took small, careful bites and he did the same, following my pace.

  “It’s delicious,” I said.

  “This is nothing. There’s a lot more where this came from,” he said. Then: “You’ll see.”

  You’ll see? Did he know, psychically, that we would have more nights like this? That we would fall in love?

  “We should drive out to the Jersey Shore together. See a movie. Eat bad food.”

  Dumbstruck, again.

  “That sounds fun,” I said.

  He looked at me, stunned, like he wasn’t sure he’d actually presented the idea out loud, like he’d been fantasizing and the verbalization of that fantasy was purely accidental.

  “Tomorrow?” he asked tentatively. Seeing his apprehension, his fear of rejection, made me less nervous. He liked me as much as I liked him. There was comfort in that equality. “Unless tomorrow isn’t good…”

  I’d planned to spend most of Sunday writing an essay for my feminist literature class. Ditching feminist lit responsibilities for a boy? I couldn’t resist the irony.

  “No, it’s great,” I said.

  “Crap,” he said, and my heart sank. I thought he was going to cancel. “I don’t have my car here anymore.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I have mine.” I was one of the only people I knew who had driven her car from home to campus. I didn’t feel right leaving it with my mom. It felt like leaving a part of me there when I really just wanted to be gone completely.

  “You have a car?” he said, delighted.

  “It’s a piece of shit, but yes.”

  I liked the idea of driving somewhere with him—to another state, no less. It felt grown-up, like a mini-vacation.

  “My mom’s car broke down over the summer, so I left mine with her,” he said.

  “That’s nice of you.” There was something sweet about a guy who loved his mother so much, who had that kind of loyalty. I’d never known a guy like that.

  “I’d do anything for her. It’s pathetic, really.”

  “It is pathetic,” I teased, “but sweet.”

  “Will you let me drive, at least? I can’t let you drive on our first date,” he said. A proper gentleman. I’d never known one of those, either.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “We’ll go to my favorite ice-cream parlor. I’ll buy you a cone, as a thank-you for the car. It’s only fair.”

  “I’m all about fairness.”

  “Start thinking about your ice-cream flavor choice,” he said. “I’ll judge you by it.”

  I already knew I’d get cookies and cream. And I knew he’d kiss me after and that it would be sweeter than any dessert.

  * * *

  I woke up to find Jenny eating Pop-Tarts on the couch, a book cracked open in front of her, which she was thoroughly ignoring in favor of a Saved by the Bell rerun on TV.

  “So. How was it?” she asked, eager for details.

  “Great,” I said. I tried to prevent the corners of my lips from curving upward, but they betrayed me.

  “I knew it!” She lurched forward in her seat, like she was about to jump up and hug me. I must have looked overwhelmed by her excitement. “Look at you—playing coy.”

  “I just don’t want to jinx it.”

  “Fair enough.” She reclined back into the couch.

  “How was your date with Brian?” I asked her.

  She rolled her eyes and playfully slapped the air between us. “Oh, that was nothing. I went with him to this dumb party. He was hanging out with all these guys. I left after an hour.”

  “Did he say he wanted to hang out again?”r />
  “He said, ‘See you around.’” She was disappointed, but trying to act like she wasn’t. I’d seen this from her before.

  “Well, you will see him around. He lives next door. You never know. See what happens.”

  “It doesn’t matter. At least one of us has a boyfriend now.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said, though I wanted her to say that, over and over again.

  “Do you have another date planned?”

  “We’re going to the Jersey Shore today.”

  “The Jersey Shore?” She said it like I’d suggested our date would be in the bottom of a trash Dumpster.

  “It’ll be nice. Drive out, see a movie, get some food.”

  “A road trip already, huh?”

  “Can I tell you something?” I said. I had to tell someone. I was bursting with it. Jenny nodded, like I knew she would. “This is going to sound crazy, but I think I found the guy I’m going to marry.”

  It was a thought that had kept me up from one o’clock in the morning, when I got home from his place, until I left my bedroom at nine o’clock, giving up on sleep. It was the beginning of something. I would have given up sleep forever to feel the anticipation of that something.

  Jenny’s eyes were huge. Marriage was one of her goals in life, right there at the forefront of her mind.

  “I can totally see it—Emily Walters.”

  See, she thought I’d been out with Gabe. Gabe Walters.

  “No, not Gabe,” I said. “Drew.”

  “Drew?” She looked perplexed. “The guy next door with the hair?”

  “Yeah. I hung out with him last night. Instead of Gabe.”

  “Really?”

  She thought I was crazy, clearly.

  “We just clicked.”

  She composed herself, resigned to being the supportive friend.

  “That’s great, Em. Really.”

  “I think so.”

  “So. What’s his last name?”

  “Morris,” I said.

  She nodded approval. “Emily Morris,” she said. “Emily Morris.”

  FOUR

  It was just a few weeks after that first official date at the Jersey Shore that I moved my clothes to Drew’s apartment and started spending all my nights there. His roommate, Brian, didn’t care. Jenny did. I told her I wasn’t really living there; I was still her roommate, technically. But that technicality fell by the wayside, and by second semester she got a new roommate. Drew and I shared his little twin bed at night and spent every waking moment together during the day. We were mutually self-absorbed, the way only young people can be. We delighted in each other’s morning breath, spent midday study breaks in bed tracing the veins on each other’s bodies with mesmerized fingertips, took showers together and shampooed each other’s hair. We used the term “soul mate.”

  After graduation, Brian moved to Boston, which meant we had to find our own place. Drew, like me, had been paying next to nothing to live in the city. The real world, with its real apartments and our lack of real income, was cruel.

  We sold my car to secure a lease on a place in Brooklyn—a one-bedroom that cost three-fourths of our take-home pay every month. This was twenty years before Brooklyn became cool, before the hipsters took over, before couples in skinny jeans moved in and started popping out kids named Atticus and Clementine. Brooklyn was run-down then, a place for people who just couldn’t afford the city. I had a job at a coffee shop, shifts starting at four in the morning six days a week. Drew worked at a shipping yard. Not because it interested him in the slightest, but because they paid him overtime under the table. If one of us could pick up an extra shift, we would. We rarely saw each other. But we told ourselves it was for our future. We told ourselves we were happy. And we were.

  It had character, that apartment. We put up a folding panel to separate our small kitchen space from the couch and TV. We created the illusion of rooms. The plumbing was shoddy, but the bathroom had a claw-foot tub that I’d fill once a week with bubbles. The creaky wood floors were chipping around the yellowing-white baseboards. They were original, from the 1920s, according to the landlord—a fifty-something chain smoker who owned the liquor store below us. We “cooked” on a hot plate because the stove was broken and the landlord always had some excuse for not getting us a new one. We had to stuff piles of clothes under our bed because the one closet barely had enough room for our winter coats. We couldn’t fit (or afford) a dresser. But we were relentlessly optimistic. We told ourselves the lack of a dresser was good because it would curb our shopping habits. And it did. I went a whole year without buying a single article of clothing—not even underwear.

  We put shabby chic curtains in the windows that made me smile every time I turned the corner of our street and saw them. They were white lace with pale blue roses. We threw a cool paisley sheet over our couch to cover up the tear in the middle cushion and the stains on the side ones. I sewed decorative throw pillows—lopsided with cotton stuffing from the craft store. Everything felt charming and personal and full of love. We were young and invincible. And we had a plan. I would go to grad school, become a literature professor at a big-name university. Drew would go to culinary school, become a chef and open a restaurant where reservations would be booked months in advance. We had dreams, all contained within the walls of that tiny Brooklyn apartment.

  * * *

  I was sitting on our couch, drinking the broth left in a bowl of soup, listening to Depeche Mode, when Drew came home. Behind him, at the end of a shiny new black nylon leash, was a dog, a golden retriever, wagging his tail so hard he nearly whipped himself in the face. He was too big to be a puppy, but had the energy of one.

  “Em,” Drew said, “meet Bruce.”

  He knew I’d always wanted a dog. My mom had a strict no-pets policy when I was growing up. Her rationale: “I can barely feed you, Emily.” I brought home a stray once—an emaciated mutt I named Scruff—and she took him to the shelter while I was at school the next day.

  I hesitated in getting up, in going to the dog, in nuzzling his face, in becoming instantly attached to him.

  “Is he ours?” I asked.

  “He sure is.”

  This was Drew’s style—spontaneous. Just the week before, he’d called me at the coffee shop, convinced me to feign illness so I could meet him at the flea market and see this “amazing lamp” he’d found. It was sixty dollars. I told him we couldn’t afford a sixty-dollar light source.

  “Shelter says he’s about a year old. Deaf out of one ear.”

  That explained the spontaneity. It was likely Drew just went to look. And then he saw Bruce and chose him because he feared nobody else would.

  I approached Bruce with my palm out for him to sniff. He skipped that getting-to-know-you step, though, and started licking my face. I laughed uncontrollably, the way little kids do when getting tickled.

  “Why ‘Bruce’?” I asked, tilting my face away from the dog’s overly friendly tongue.

  Drew shrugged. “He just looked like a Bruce.”

  We went to the pet store that night, strolled the aisles, filled our cart with tug-toys, stuffed animals, meat-flavored treats, and a forty-pound bag of kibble. Drew had just gotten his first credit card. He used it freely, convinced we would pay it off in one fell swoop when we were rich. I believed him because I wanted to.

  Bruce waited in the backseat of the car while we were in the store. He yelped when we came out, as if he already recognized us, as if he already knew we were his parents, the three of us a family.

  “He’s like our little kid,” I said, reaching over the center console to scratch his nose on our drive home.

  “He is,” Drew said.

  Then: “We should make it right.”

  “Make what right?”

  “Be a proper family.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “We should get married,” he said.

  I looked at him and he took his eyes off the road quickly to meet my stare
. He glanced back and forth—road to me, me to road, road to me—several times. He was exhilarated, like a skydiver jumping out of a plane.

  “What?” I said.

  “We should just do it, start our lives together officially.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. I mean, we love each other, right? Why are we waiting? We should just do it.”

  There was no ring. That’s how I knew it was a spur-of-the- moment impulse versus an orchestrated event. Maybe that was more romantic. Maybe the bended knee was overrated. We should just do it. He didn’t even propose, really. A proposal comes with a question. He made a statement.

  Concerns swirled in my head—we don’t have actual jobs yet, we can barely make rent, we’re too young. Drew always called me a worrywart. I knew that’s what he would have called me right then, if I’d vocalized my thoughts, so I just said:

  “Okay.”

  Then: “I need a ring.”

  He smiled—the very smile that made me fall in love at first sight—and said, “Let’s stop by the mall on the way home.”

  And that’s just what we did. We went to one of those chain jewelry stores that had commercials on television about “special deals for that special someone.” I picked out a half-carat, round-cut diamond on a gold band. We put it on his card.

  The following week, we applied for a marriage license and made an appointment for our “I do’s” at the city clerk’s office downtown. That’s what they called it—an appointment, not a ceremony. Drew picked the date—September 26, exactly two years after the day we met.

  “That’s romantic, right?” he said.

  I bit my lip. “It’s a Monday.”

  I bought a dress at Macy’s—an above-the-knee casual white dress more adequate for a champagne brunch. It was discounted as part of an end-of-summer sale. On September 26, we showed up at the courthouse, me in the dress, Drew in his one and only suit with the pant legs a couple inches too long. We should have splurged on hemming.

  I hadn’t talked to my mom in a year or so, but Drew insisted we invite her. Surprisingly, she showed up, in a blue dress I remembered her wearing years before, during the short phase when she dated a guy I called the Gambler. He took her to fancy dinners around the city until he ran out of money and disappeared completely. The dress no longer fit her, since she’d gained weight in her middle. I could see the side seams stretching. Drew’s mom came, too. She brought a bouquet of pink carnations. We waited in line, between two ropes, like at a fancy Manhattan club. Drew’s mom stood behind me. I could hear the carnations rustling in their plastic wrapping. She’d started having tremors in her left hand. The doctor gave her the name of a specialist to see. She didn’t go. She said the doctors didn’t know anything, that she was just having muscle spasms from gardening too much.