Catch My Drift Read online

  At nineteen, while Lorna slaved to recreate Kenneth’s mother’s meat aspic, did he already know this was the kind of “gal” he wanted? She’d tried so hard to guess at what he wanted. Bow in the hair? Short hair? Permanent? Kenneth seemed to want everything a particular way — hot breakfasts, no radio while studying, toothpaste squeezed from the bottom only — but on the matter of Lorna, his preferences always felt hazy. He’d be happy for her to join his crowd at the Grad Club after class one night, but the next week the suggestion would make him furious. For years, Lorna wondered what she’d finally done to push him the wrong way, to make her life plan teeter and topple like a game of Jenga. But at thirty-three, it was easy enough to see what had happened. He’d made a rash decision out of guilt and didn’t want his whole life consumed by it. When that physiotherapist told Lorna she could swim again, he believed it meant his penance was over, that he could finally get on with his life. It was understandable, although he could have been much kinder.

  Amanda cast her beaming face toward Kenneth, who was now half in the pantry. “Don’t you love the wallpaper in here, hon? It’s so yellow!”

  Kenneth didn’t answer. He seemed to be keeping his distance from both women.

  Amanda approached the sliding doors leading out to the snow-patched yard. She pressed her hands and face up to the glass. “Not a ton of space out back, but such a cute garden.”

  “Just a rock garden.”

  Amanda yanked the sliding door open, letting in a wet sweep of air. The sound of giggling drifted over from the yard next door. The seventeen-year-old, Elena Costas, no doubt.

  Amanda wrinkled her nose. “Are those skunks?”

  Lorna sniffed and shook her head. “Just dope, I think.” She pointed her chin at the neighbour’s yard. “Teenagers next door.”

  “Oh,” Amanda frowned, a complete reassessment of the neighbourhood visible on her face. “But no critters back here?”

  Lorna glanced at Kenneth then; she couldn’t help it. They’d had raccoons on their balcony. That May, she and Kenneth would get down on the apartment’s thin grey carpet and watch through the glass door as the raccoons climbed out of the building’s dumpster and onto their first-floor balcony with a mix of blunder and grace. There were just a couple small ones at first, then they multiplied. Lorna joked that it was like a raccoon nightclub — sometimes ten or eleven of them fighting and fucking until sunrise. In the morning they’d find them asleep, nipples up to the sun, trampled mounds of toxic shit everywhere. In the end, Kenneth and Lorna couldn’t even open the doors to let a cross-breeze through. Her tomatoes, which he blamed for the invasion, spoiled in the sun. When they washed their clothes at home to save money, they had to hang them inside and swipe through a jungle of humid pant legs to cross the single room. Lorna got a heat rash that needed thick expensive cream that made her itchy and unfuckable.

  Amanda seemed to have forgotten the matter of critters and was scratching around inside her purse. “Can you give me your agent’s name?”

  “Let me find you a card.” Lorna moved to the kitchen drawer. She knew she wouldn’t hear from them and felt honestly sorry for Amanda’s disappointment. Which of the house’s imperfections would Kenneth focus on? After the fight, would Amanda feel stupid and unsure of herself? What had she already given up for his good opinion?

  At the door, Lorna handed the card to Kenneth. “I should be honest with you,” she said. Kenneth looked up, a nervous twist in his lips. She turned to Amanda. “We do have critter problems from time to time. Raccoons, mainly. Nothing serious.”

  Amanda tucked her hair behind her ears. “That’s the city though, right?” She looked at Kenneth for confirmation, but he was facing away, his hand already on the doorknob.

  Amanda bent down to deal with her boots, steadying herself with a manicured hand on Kenneth’s arm. Kenneth’s eyes met Lorna’s. “Appreciate that,” he said, then he turned the doorknob. “Thanks for the tour.”

  Lorna watched them walk away from the house: the atlas tucked under Kenneth’s arm, Amanda’s fingertips on his elbow.

  Back in the kitchen, the sliding glass doors were still partly open. The old leaves on the rain-flattened lawn ticked up with the breeze. Lorna stuck her head out into the cool, wet air.

  In the yard next door, Elena Costas and a boy were huddled by the shed. The boy smoked the joint, pinching it between his fingers, his eyes on the ground. He resembled the boys in Cara’s pin-ups: tall but baby-faced, slouched in a Raiders jacket. Lorna could see across the yard that Elena’s desert boots were soaked through. Her tight jeans had a cloudy pattern, and she bent her knees over and over to keep warm. Elena was a pretty girl who wore far too much makeup. Cara, of course, idolized her.

  The boy took a last puff and chucked the joint onto the muddy grass. He picked up his backpack and loped across to the gate. Elena watched him go, hands in the pockets of her open cardigan. Lorna’s heart dropped low in her chest. Poor, pretty Elena. She didn’t know where that boy was going, if she was invited, if he’d come back. She wanted to say something reassuring to Elena, but what?

  Lorna stepped outside. The yard had an orchard-like smell, and she breathed it in with sudden appetite. In a minute, she would call Ruthie back. She would take Cara out for dinner, learn more about the New Kids, find a way to bring up sports bras. Cara wouldn’t be polite, but at least she’d be close.

  It was only after the boy was through the gate that Elena looked up in Lorna’s direction. Lorna smiled gently, waved. Elena untucked the hair from behind her ears and let it fall to cover her face. She hurried, head down, to unlock her own back door.

  Bounced

  Spring, 1989

  Practising for Wimbledon?”

  I catch the tennis ball on the face of my racquet and look up. A blond woman in a pink suit is leaning on the gate to our yard, one hand on her hip.

  “No,” I say, embarrassed. “I’m just bouncing a ball.”

  “I can see that,” the woman says. “Your mom’s inside?”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman is pretty much a flamingo — skinny legs, pointy pink shoes —and the biggest butt ever sticks right out under her jacket. She goes up to the door, and I go back to bouncing the ball against the side of the house. I imagine the flamingo is a tennis scout looking for kids to take to training in Florida. Right now she’s saying, “I saw your daughter volleying out there, and I just had to pull over!”

  To increase the chances of this actually happening, I stop bouncing for a minute to tap my racquet against the side door seven times. It’s what I need to do to have good luck, or at least for nothing bad to happen. Before going to bed, I touch every window and every door in our house: seven taps each. This protects us pretty well. For example, when Mom tried to sell our house last month — because she doesn’t seem to care that it’s the house I grew up in, the only house I ever want to live in — no one bought it. Even the sign is gone. Then I got a B+ on my oral book report, even though I made up the existence of the tennis book Ace Age pretty much on the spot. The best part is I’ve been Queen of the Court in tennis lessons three weeks in a row, and my instructor, Dan Bangor, smiled at me twice.

  After a little bit, the screen door opens and Mom and the flamingo step out into the yard.

  “Cara, can you cool it a minute?” Mom says. Her hair is blow-dried and she is wearing peach lipstick, which is definitely not normal. “I want you to meet Mrs. Needham.” Tennis scouts have names like Sue or Carole-Anne. Not Mrs. Needham. We both say hi.

  The flamingo walks around me in a circle. “So this is your yard, huh?” She writes something on a notepad and makes a sucking sound. “That changes things. You had me thinking annuals garden.”

  “I have a little rock garden. Stone cress, sandwort, candytuft,” Mom says.

  The flamingo jerks her chin at a rip in the screen door. “You’ll want to patch that up before having anyone in.” She looks at me like she knows it’s my fault. “It’s one of those small things
that can really change an impression.”

  “Who’s coming over?” I ask.

  “No one today, honey,” Mom says.

  The flamingo claps her notebook shut. “Let’s see the basement.” She waggles a finger at me. “Go easy, Ms. Evert.”

  Chris Evert hasn’t won a grand slam in like three years. “I like Martina,” I tell her as she disappears inside.

  When I hear the flamingo clacking away from our house later, I don’t stop bouncing to say goodbye. I only stop when Mom calls Jed and me for dinner. We’re having a “summer dinner.” Summer dinner means cold cuts on a plate with brown bread and vegetable sticks. I get a can of tonic water from the fridge and take a long sip. It’s the only soft drink in the house.

  “Have you ever wished we lived just a little closer to school?” Mom says. She sits down and unfolds her napkin.

  “No,” I say. School is the last place I want to live near.

  “Well, that’s something we can talk about.” She puts her fingertips together and leans forward in her chair. “I’ve decided to put our house back on the market.”

  “What does ‘back on the market’ mean?” I picture a giant grocery store where houses sit nestled between pointy pieces of paper grass.

  “It means we’re selling it again, idiot,” Jed says, his mouth rammed with mock chicken.

  “That’s why I wanted you to meet Mrs. Needham,” Mom says. “She’s our new agent.”

  “What happened to Brenda?”

  “Mrs. Needham is different,” Mom says. “Very experienced, very respected. She’s married to Ian, my boss, so she’s giving us a bit of a break. We’re going to give this another shot—”

  “I don’t want to move,” I say for the six hundredth time.

  “This house is too big for three, don’t you think?” Mom says.

  I didn’t think so in the winter; I don’t think so now. “What if Dad comes back?” I ask. It’s not like that’s never happened. One Christmas he was gone for three weeks, and then he came right back.

  “That’s very unlikely,” Mom says. “Besides, we have a whole yard we never use, a living room just for Christmas.”

  “So you want, like, an apartment?” Jed asks. He smears hard butter on a piece of bread, shredding it into pieces.

  I look at Mom. She wouldn’t. Apartments are for poor people. Petra Sokolov, my tennis enemy, lives in an apartment. I know because Mom made me go to her stupid birthday party. All the girls in my class were invited, but none of the good ones showed up. The Sokolovs’ hallway stunk like boiled cauliflower and their balcony had bird shit everywhere. Mr. Sokolov gave her the set of ninety-nine earrings for ninety-nine cents that they sell at the back of Teen Day Magazine, and we each got a pair to take home. Mom usually says those kinds of earrings are junk that will turn your ears green, but she made me wear my dangly bananas to tennis the next week. “The Sokolovs don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “That was such a thoughtful thing for Petra’s dad to do.”

  Mom looks at us with eyes all big and round like a kids’ librarian. “Who knows where we’ll land. Moving is an adventure. We’re going to have fun with Mrs. Needham.”

  “That’s very unlikely,” I say.

  When Dad moved out, it was hardly an adventure. He took me with him to steal milk crates from the A&P after dark. I watched for security guards while he piled the crates from the loading dock into the car. It was late February, and the wind smashed my face and made the tips of my ears feel poisoned. When he finally left, Dad tripped on the ice outside and dropped his stereo in front of the house. All the parts went springing everywhere. That was the only time I’ve seen him cry. I found some of the screws and stuff after the old snow melted. They’re in a plastic baggie in my underwear drawer.

  “Sick! Your meat has a rainbow on it!” Jed says. I look at the roast beef in my hands and see the shimmery strip through the middle. I fling it back on the platter.

  “Cara!” Mom says. “Eat what you touch! Do you think meat is free?”

  “It has a rainbow!”

  Mom picks up the same piece and wraps it around a celery stick. She takes a bite and then hands the stick back to me. The celery is gross and raggedy where she bit. “Do you see me dying?”

  At the end of the week, a sign goes up on our front lawn with a picture of the flamingo’s face. She is resting her chin on her fist and smiling so wide it looks like she could swallow her head backwards. The sign says “#1 Sale: Here when you ‘Needham’!” I keep an eye out front while I’m bouncing my tennis ball after school, but nobody stops by to ask how much our house costs.

  A few Saturdays after Mom’s announcement, we have an open house again, which means strangers get to come over and look at all our personal stuff. I want to stay and see the people, but open houses are for everyone except the family who actually lives there.

  I spend the afternoon at Sam’s house, where I pretty much live on weekends anyway. Mom’s always trying to get me to invite people from school over, but the girls in my class are either losers like Valerie Calorie, or too cool and pretty to be friends with anyone other than themselves. The fab five are the coolest girls: Erica B., Erica L., Ash, Jill, and Kyla. They all take gymnastics on Thursdays, wear Vuarnet, and pass each other fluorescent Post-it notes during class that Durant pretends not to see. Even she sucks up to them. I’m just waiting: eventually one of the girls will move away or get kicked out of the group for some reason, and they’ll need a replacement to stay a fivesome. Until then, it’s better to just hang out with Sam, whom no one knows, and just practise at being cool.

  When Sam’s mom is home, we usually bake or do crafts. When it’s just Sam and me, we do the games that Sam makes up. Sometimes we pretend to be Jewish refugees and set up camps in the basement or the pool cabana. Sometimes we call people and tell them they’ll win a cruise if they can guess Sam’s teacher at Hebrew school, Mr. Leftin’s, first name. It’s Pinchus, so impossible to guess. We also have a band called Scam, which is our names put together. Our best song is “Pregnant again and just turned ten,” even though I’m turning eleven in June. Today, Sam wants to have a séance in the basement while her mom is at Jazzercise.

  The Grossmans’ basement smells like damp cement and the whole space is rammed with junk: World Books, an old gerbil cage, Sam’s baby furniture. Sam told me her parents are holding on to the baby stuff just in case, but their babies keep dying before they’re born.

  Sam and I sit cross-legged on a couple of dusty patio cushions next to the dryer. She sets her Mom’s Shabbat candles in a circle around us, lighting each one with a mini pink Bic. We have to be pretty quiet because we’re not totally alone. Violet, the Grossmans’ Jamaican cleaning lady, is upstairs. Because of Violet, everything but the basement smells like limes.

  Sam puts a white paper plate between us. With a black marker, she draws a star right in the middle. She calls it a pentagon. “Who do you want to bring back from the dead?” she asks. Her cheeks are orange from the candles.

  I can’t stop squirming around. I’m not exactly scared, just kind of nervous and excited to speak to ghosts. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know anyone who died?”

  I think about Sam’s mom’s dead babies, but maybe that’s too creepy. “What about Marcia Riley?” Marcia got kidnapped from her apartment building a few summers ago, and no one ever found her body. She went to swimming class at the same time as me, but she wasn’t in my badge. The kidnapping was all over the newspaper for a while, and Mom practically wouldn’t let me leave my room. By now it seems everyone’s forgotten about her.

  “I think it works better if it’s someone we actually knew,” Sam says. “Someone who’d want to talk to us.”

  I think for a minute. “My godmother died. I don’t remember her that well, but she was my mom’s best friend.”

  Sam’s eyes widen. “Really? What was her name?”

  “Debbie.”

  “Debbie what?”

  “I don’t r
emember. I was only like five when she kicked it.” Most of what I remember about Debbie is the dying part.

  “How did she die?”

  “Car accident.” Mom says her car broke down on the highway, and when she got out to flag help, some truck slid on the ice trying to stop and plowed right into her.

  “Was she pretty?”

  “I guess.” There’s a picture of her on top of our TV. She was a redhead with freckles. When I was a little kid, I used to draw her a lot because her hair was fat enough to use the whole brush of a Mr. Sketch.

  “OK, let’s do her.”

  Sam takes my hands and hers are sweaty. She scrunches her eyebrows together. “We’re calling on the spirit of Debbie. Debbie, if you’re there, give us a sign.”

  We sit for a minute, maybe more. Nothing happens.

  I look at Sam. “What kind of sign?”

  Sam glances around the room. “OK, Debbie. If you’re here, make the flames flicker.”

  We keep our eyes open this time and try to concentrate on the candles, but it’s hard to tell if they’re flickering or not.

  “Your turn,” Sam whispers.

  “What do I do?”

  “Ask Debbie a yes or no question.”

  I don’t know how Sam knows all these rules. “Is she even here?”

  “Of course. Aren’t you, like, way colder than before? It’s the spirit passing through.”

  I can’t tell if I’m colder, but maybe Sam’s right. “Hi, Debbie . . . ” I start to laugh; it’s too weird talking out loud to a ghost.

  “This is serious, Cara.” Sam squeezes my hands.

  I try to swallow the laughter. “OK, OK,” I say, thinking hard. “Is Mom going to sell our house? Yes or no? Give us a sign.”

  We wait. I listen to the creak of Violet’s footsteps upstairs. A toilet flushes somewhere and I hear the whoosh in the pipes. Was that a sign? I look at Sam, but she has her eyes closed tight. I concentrate on the flames, try to pay attention to everything around me. Upstairs, Violet is humming what sounds like Roy Orbison’s “You Got It.” Roy Orbison died last Christmas. I know because Mom was practically crying when she read it in the paper. “Somehow I thought he could never die,” she said. I guess she was really into him when she was my age.