Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [13]
By the next year she’d bounced off the Cohen girls to the most popular socks-matching-sweaters circle, and in eighth grade her picture was in the junior high yearbook eleven times, six times with boys. But in ninth grade, as I was finally figuring out the rules, happily wearing skirts barely covering my underpants and hiphuggers riding just above my pubic bone, she quit horseback riding and modern dance and pep band and got fat and angry and more weird-looking than the rest of us. She wore sunglasses and bunny bedroom slippers and mirror-spotted Indian halters to school. She called to tell me the dachshund had had a heart attack, and then she said “I’m sorry,” and we never got off the phone. We played records into the receivers for each other, and occasionally Rachel played her guitar over the phone. On weekends we answered the personal ads in the The Village Voice and made dates we would never keep with grown men whose desperation and terrifying want could only be managed by ridicule. The more elaborate the date plans, the more specific the costume requests, the harder we laughed when we got off the phone. Given weapons, we would have been snipers.
Most of my teachers liked me, and I didn’t feel too bad about being in Extended Algebra, which took three semesters to do what everyone else did in two. If they had had Super-Extended Algebra, I would have been in that. Mr. Provatella saw that although I grasped the concepts of algebra, I had not learned how to divide and could barely multiply, and while everyone else struggled through endless sheets of equations, he and I talked about infinity and the envelope of time.
Mr. Stone, my English teacher, read poetry to our class and told me I could show him my own poems after school. I sat next to him, smelling his coffee and tobacco and middle-aged-man smell, watching him roll up his sleeves over his wide arms. He tapped a ridged fingernail over each line, circling a misplaced word, running a yellowed fingertip back and forth over a nice phrase.
I wrote poems about loneliness and terrible fires in crowded tenement buildings and poets dying in the Russian snow.
Mr. Stone said, “I know you know about the loneliness, honey,” and he crossed out every other line and made me put away all the poems located in places I’d never been. I brought him three boxes of blue pencils.
Mrs. Hill and I were working our way through Pride and Prejudice and the story of her courtship with Mr. Hill. I gave her a couple of manicures without hurting her too badly and hoped she wouldn’t ask for a pedicure. One afternoon, I found her smiling in her sleep when I walked in, her feet, brown and yellow and bumpy as toads, soaking in warm water and chamomile leaves. I dried her feet and moisturized them and filed down her toenails and painted them Carnaby Crimson.
I had everything I needed.
Peace Like a River
From behind Mr. Stones desk I watched the entire junior high walk by, their faces passing between my pointy toes. I drank Mr. Stones coffee and waited for someone to admire my red cowboy boots propped up on a pile of blue books. I shut the door and read everyone’s grades.
In that little office, with the frosted-glass window facing me and the view of the parking lot behind me, with the dirty metal file cabinets and the film of cigarette ash and dust and the apple cores rotting in Mr. Stone’s wastebasket from Monday to Friday, I felt whole. The dreams other girls tried to make real with boys or clothes or horses were nothing to me. The best dream, the true red heart of my life, was Mr. Stone; Rachel and Mrs. Hill were the ribbon, and books were the lace trim.
When he came in, I was crying.
“Liz, what’s the matter?”
“My father’s moving out.”
My sharply